In 1853, the year of the land regulations, the Governor was entrusted with the task of proclaiming the const.i.tution. He took the rather curious course of bringing the Provincial Councils into existence, and leaving the summoning of the central Parliament to his successor. He left the Colony in December of the same year, praised and regretted by the Maoris, regarded by the settlers with mixed feelings.
Nevertheless, it would not be easy now to find any one who would refuse a very high meed of praise to Governor Grey"s first administration. It was not merely that he found the Colony on the brink of ruin, and left it in a state of prosperity and progress. Able subalterns, a rise in prices, the development of some new industry, might have brought about the improvement. Such causes have often made reputation for colonial rulers and statesmen. But in Grey"s case no impartial student can fail to see that to a considerable extent the change for the better was due to him. Moreover, he not only grappled with the difficulties of his time, but with both foresight and power of imagination built for the future, and--with one marked exception--laid foundations deep and well.
If the Colonial Office did not see its way to retain Grey in the Colony until his const.i.tution had been put into full working order, it should, at least, have seen that he was replaced by a capable official. This was not done. His successor did not arrive for two years, and meanwhile the Vice-regal office devolved upon Colonel Wynyard, a good-natured soldier, unfitted for the position. The first Parliament of New Zealand was summoned, and met at Auckland on the Queen"s birthday in 1854. Many, perhaps most, of its members were well-educated men of character and capacity. The presence of Gibbon Wakefield, now himself become a colonist, added to the interest of the scene. At last, those who had been agitating so long for self-government had the boon apparently within their grasp. In their eyes it was a great occasion--the true commencement of national life in the Colony. The irony of fate, or the perversity of man, turned it into a curious anticlimax. The Parliament, indeed, duly a.s.sembled. But it dispersed after weeks of ineffectual wrangling and intrigue, amid scenes which were discreditable and are still ridiculous. Those who had drawn up the const.i.tution had forgotten that Government, through responsible Ministers forming a Cabinet and possessing the confidence of the elective Chamber, must be a necessary part of their system. Not only was no provision made for it in the written const.i.tution, but the Colonial Office had sent the Governor no instructions on the subject.
The Viceroy was surrounded by Patent Officers, some of whom had been administering since the first days of the Colony. No place of refuge had been prepared for them, and, naturally, they were not going to surrender their posts without a struggle. Colonel Wynyard was wax in the hands of the cleverest of these--Mr. Attorney-General Swainson.
When the Parliament met, he asked three members to join with his old advisers in forming a Cabinet. They agreed to do so, and one of them, Mr. James Edward Fitzgerald, a Canterbury settler of brilliant abilities, figured as the Colony"s first Premier. An Irish gentleman, an orator and a wit, he was about as fitted to cope with the peculiar and delicate imbroglio before him as Murat would have been to conceive and direct one of Napoleon"s campaigns. In a few weeks he and his Parliamentary colleagues came to loggerheads with the old officials in the Cabinet, and threw up the game. Then came prorogation for a fortnight and another hybrid ministry, known to New Zealand history as the "Clean-Shirt Ministry," because its leader ingenuously informed Parliament that when asked by the Governor to form an administration, he had gone upstairs to put on a clean shirt before presenting himself at Government House. The Clean-Shirt Ministry lived for just two days.
It was born and died amid open recrimination and secret wire-pulling, throughout which Mr. Attorney Swainson, who had got himself made Speaker of the Upper House while retaining his post as the Governor"s legal adviser, and Mr. Gibbon Wakefield, who was ostensibly nothing but a private member of the Lower House, pulled the strings behind the scenes. Wakefield began by putting himself at the head of the agitation for responsible Ministers. When later, after negotiating with the Governor"s _entourage_, he tried compromise, the majority of the House turned angrily upon him. At last a compromise was arrived at. Colonel Wynyard was to go on with his Patent Officers until a Bill could be pa.s.sed and a.s.sented to in England establishing responsible government; then the old officials were to be pensioned off and shelved. At one stage in this singular session, the Governor sent a message to the House written on sheets of paper, one of the leaves of which the clerk found to be missing. Gibbon Wakefield thereupon coolly pulled the missing portion out of his pocket and proposed to hand it in--a piece of effrontery which the House could not stomach. On another occasion the door of the House had to be locked to prevent the minority running away to force on a count-out, and one honourable member a.s.saulted another with his fists. Australia laughed at the scene, which, it may here be said, has never been repeated in the New Zealand Legislature. The greatest man in the Parliament was the greatest failure of the session. Gibbon Wakefield left Auckland unpopular and distrusted. Soon afterwards his health broke down, and the rest of his life was pa.s.sed in strict retirement in the Colony which he had founded and in which he died.
The Colonial Office snubbed Colonel Wynyard and Mr. Swainson, and informed them that responsible government could be initiated without an Act of Parliament. A year, however, pa.s.sed before the General a.s.sembly was summoned together, and then it merely did formal work, as the Acting-Governor had taken upon himself to ordain that there should be a dissolution previous to the establishment of responsible Ministers. This put everything off till the middle of 1856, by which time Colonel Wynyard had left the Colony. To his credit be it noted that he had kept out of native wars. Moreover, in his time, thanks to the brisk trade caused by the gold discoveries in Australia and the progress of sheep-farming in the South Island, the Colony was waxing prosperous.
The second Parliament met in 1856, and still for a time there was confusion. First, Mr. Sewell formed a ministry which lived for thirteen days; then Sir William Fox another which existed for thirteen days more. After that, Sir Edward Stafford took the helm and made headway. A loan of 600,000 was the fair wind which filled his sails. Judgment in choosing colleagues and officials, very fair administrative abilities, attention to business, and an indisposition to push things to extremes in the House were some of the qualities which enabled him to retain office for four years, and to regain it more than once afterwards. Until 1873 he and his rival, Mr. Fox, were considered inevitable members of almost any combination. Native affairs were in the forefront during that period. Mr. Fox, the most impulsive, pugnacious, and controversial of politicians, usually headed the peace party; Sir Edward Stafford, much more easy going in ordinary politics, was usually identified with those who held that peace could only be secured by successful war.
The other princ.i.p.al moving cause in public affairs between 1856 and 1876 was the Provincial system. That had had much to do with the confusion of the sessions of 1854 and 1856. Then and afterwards members were not so much New Zealanders, or Liberals, or Conservatives, as they were Aucklanders, or men of Otago, or some other Province. The hot vigorous local life which Provincial inst.i.tutions intensified was in itself an admirable thing. But it engendered a mild edition of the feelings which set Greek States and Italian cities at each others" throats. From the first many colonists were convinced that Provincialism was unnatural and must go. But for twenty years the friends of the Provinces were usually ready to forego quarrelling with each other when the Centralists in Parliament threatened the Councils. There were able men in the Colony who devoted their energies by preference to Provincial politics. Such was Dr.
Featherston, who was for eighteen years the trusted superintendent of Wellington, and who, paternally despotic there, watched and influenced Parliament, and was ever vigilant on the Provinces" behalf.
In truth the Provinces had been charged with important functions. The management and sale of Crown lands, education, police, immigration, laws relating to live-stock and timber, harbours, the making of roads and bridges--almost the entire work of colonization--came within their scope. By a "compact" arrived at in the session of 1856 each Province was in effect given the entire control of its public lands--an immense advantage to those of the South Island, where these were neither forest-covered nor in Maori hands. On the other hand, it would have been grossly unfair to confiscate them for general purposes. The Wakefield system in Canterbury would have been unbearable had the 2 paid by the settlers for each acre been sent away to be spent elsewhere. The Wakefield price was a local tax, charged and submitted to to get a revenue to develop the lands for which it was paid. As it was, half a crown an acre was handed over by each Province to the Central Treasury as a contribution for national purposes. Loans were also raised by Parliament to buy native land for the North Island Provinces.
On the other hand, the Provinces enjoyed their land revenue--when there was any--their pastoral rents, a dog tax, and such f.a.g-ends of customs revenue as the central Government could spare them. Their condition was quite unequal. Canterbury, with plenty of high-priced land, could more than dispense with aid from the centre. Other Provinces, with little or no land revenue, were mortified by having to appear at Wellington as suppliants for special grants. When the Provinces borrowed money for the work of development, they had to pay higher rates of interest than the Colony would have had. Finally, the colonial treasurer had not only to finance for one large Colony, but for half a dozen smaller governments, and ultimately to guarantee their debts. No wonder that one of her premiers has said that New Zealand was a severe school of statesmanship.
Yet for many years the ordinary dissensions of Liberal and Tory, of cla.s.ses and the parties of change and conservatism, were hardly seen in the Parliament which sat at Auckland until 1864 and thereafter at Wellington. Throughout the settlements labour as a rule was in demand, often able to dictate its own terms, nomadic, and careless of politics. The land question was relegated to the Provincial councils, where round it contending cla.s.ses and rival theories were grouped.
It was in some of the councils, notably that of Otago, that the mutterings of Radicalism began first to be heard. The rapid change which bred a parliamentary Radical party after the fall of the Provinces in 1876 was the inevitable consequence of the transfer of the land problem to the central legislature and the destruction of those local safety-valves--the councils. Meanwhile, the ordinary lines of division were not found in the central legislature. According as this or that question came into the foreground, parties and groups in the House of Representatives shifted and changed like the cloud shown to Polonius. Politics made strange bedfellows; Cabinets were sometimes the oddest hybrids. One serviceably industrious lawyer, Mr. Henry Sewell, was something or other in nine different Ministries between 1854 and 1872. The premier of one year might be a subordinate minister the next; or some subtle and persistent nature, like that of Sir Frederick Whitaker, might manage chiefs whom he appeared to follow, and be the guiding mind of parties which he did not profess to direct.
Lookers-on asked for more stable executives and more definite lines of cleavage. Newly arrived colonists impatiently summed it all up as mere battling of Ins against Outs, and lamented the sweet simplicity of political divisions as they had known them in the mother country.
Chapter XV
GOVERNOR BROWNE"S BAD BARGAIN
"In defence of the colonists of New Zealand, of whom I am one, I say most distinctly and solemnly that I have never known a single act of wilful injustice or oppression committed by any one in authority against a New Zealander."
--_Bishop Selwyn_ (1862).
Colonel Gore Browne took the reins from Colonel Wynyard. The one was just such an honourable and personally estimable soldier as the other.
But though he did not involve his Parliament in ridicule, Governor Browne did much more serious mischief. In ordinary matters he took the advice of the Stafford Ministry, but in Native affairs the Colonial Office had stipulated that the Governor was to have an over-riding power. He was to take the advice of his ministers, but not necessarily to follow it. To most politicians, as well as the public, the Native Department remained a secret service, though, except as to a sum of 7,000, the Governor, in administering Native affairs, was dependent for supplies on his ministers, and they on Parliament. On Governor Browne, therefore, rests the chief responsibility for a disastrous series of wars which broke out in 1860, and were not finally at an end for ten years. The impatience of certain colonists to buy lands from the Maori faster than the latter cared to sell them was the simple and not too creditable cause of the outbreak. A broad survey of the position shows that there need have been no hurry over land acquisition. Nor was there any great clamour for haste except in Taranaki, where rather less than 3,000 settlers, restricted to 63,000 acres, fretted at the sight of 1,750 Maoris holding and shutting up 2,000,000 acres against them. So high did feeling run there that Bishop Selwyn, as the friend of the Maori, was, in 1855, hooted in the streets of New Plymouth, where the local newspaper wrote nonsense about his "blighting influence." Yet, as he tersely put it in his charge to his angry laity of the district guilty of this unmannerly outburst, the Taranaki Maoris and others of their race had already sold 30,000 acres near New Plymouth for tenpence an acre, a million of acres at Napier for a penny three-farthings an acre, the whole of the territory round Auckland for about fourpence an acre, and the whole South Island below the Kaikouras for a mite an acre. They had also--the bishop might have added--leased large tracts ultimately turned into freeholds. Yet the impatience of the Taranaki settlers, though mischievous, was natural. The Maoris made no use of a hundredth part of their lands. Moreover, members of the Taranaki tribes who were anxious to sell plots to the Whites were threatened, attacked, and even a.s.sa.s.sinated by their fellow-tribesmen.
Never bullied, and not much interfered with by the Government, the Maori tribes as a whole were prospering. They farmed, and drove a brisk trade with the settlements, especially Auckland, where, in 1858, no less than fifty-three coasting vessels were registered as belonging to Native owners. Still, the growing numbers of the colonists alarmed them. They saw their race becoming the weaker partner. Originating in Taranaki, a league was formed by a number of the tribes against further selling of land. To weld this league together, certain powerful Waikato chiefs determined to have a king. Of them the most celebrated was the son of Hongi"s old antagonist, Te Waharoa. This leader, Wiremu Tamihana, usually known as William Thompson, was an educated Christian and a brown-skinned gentleman, far in advance of his race in breadth of view, logical understanding, and persistence.
He honestly wanted to be at peace with us, but regarding contact with our race as deadly to his own, desired to organize the Maori as a community dwelling apart from the _Pakeha_ on ample and carefully secured territories. Had the Maori race numbered 500,000 instead of 50,000, and been capable of uniting under him for any purpose whatever, he might conceivably have established a counterpart to Basutoland. But the scanty dwindling tribes could not be welded together. New Zealand was, as she is, the land of jealousies, local and personal. It would seem as though every change of wind brought fresh rivalry and division. The Waikato chiefs themselves were at odds. After years of argument and speech-making they came to the point of choosing their king. But they compromised on the old chief, Te Whero Whero. The once famous warrior was now blind, broken, and enfeebled. When, in 1860, he died, they made the still greater mistake of choosing as successor his son Matutaera (Methuselah), better known as Tawhiao, a dull, heavy, sullen-looking fool, who afterwards became a sot. They disclaimed hostility to the Queen, but would sell no land, and would allow no Whites to settle among them except a few mechanics whose skill they wished to use. They even expelled from their villages white men who had married Maori wives, and who now had to leave their families behind. They would not allow the Queen"s writ to run beyond their _aukati_ or frontier, or let boats and steamers come up their rivers. Amongst themselves the more violent talked of driving the _Pakeha_ into the sea. s.p.a.ce will not permit of any sketch of the discussions and negotiations by which attempts were made to deal with the King Movement. Various mistakes were made. Thompson, while still open to conciliation, visited Auckland to see the Governor and ask for a small loan to aid his tribe in erecting a flour-mill. Governor Grey would have granted both the interview and the money with good grace.
Governor Browne refused both, and the Waikato chief departed deeply incensed. A much graver error was the virtual repeal of the ordinance forbidding the sale of arms to the natives. Because a certain amount of smuggling went on in spite of it, the insane course was adopted of greatly relaxing its provisions instead of spending money and vigilance in enforcing them. The result was a rapid increase of the guns and powder sold to the disaffected tribes, who are said to have spent 50,000 in buying them between 1857 and 1860. Between July, 1857, and April, 1858, at any rate, 7,849 lbs. of gunpowder, 311 double-barrelled guns, and 441 single-barrelled guns were openly sold to Maoris.
Finally, in 1860, came the Waitara land purchase--the spark which set all ablaze. The name Waitara has been extended from a river both to a little seaport and to the surrounding district in Taranaki, the province where, as already said, feeling on the land difficulty had always been most acute. Enough land had been purchased, chiefly by Grey, to enable the settlement to expand into a strip of about twenty miles along the seash.o.r.e, with an average depth of about seven miles.
During a visit to the district, Governor Browne invited the Ngatiawa natives to sell land. A chief, Teira, and his friends at once offered to part with six hundred acres which they were occupying. The head of their tribe, however, Wiremu Kingi, vetoed the sale. The Native Department and the Governor sent down commissioners, who, after inquiry, decided erroneously that Teira"s party had a right to sell, and the head chief none to interfere. A fair price was paid for the block, and surveyors sent to it. The Ngatiawa good-humouredly encountered these with a band of old women well selected for their ugliness, whose appalling endearments effectually obstructed the survey work. Then, as Kingi threatened war, an armed force was sent to occupy the plot. After two days" firing upon a stockade erected there, the soldiers advanced and found it empty. Kingi, thus attacked, astutely made the disputed piece over to the King tribes, and forthwith became their _protege_. Without openly making war, they sent him numbers of volunteer warriors. He became the protagonist of the Maori land league. The Taranaki tribe hard by New Plymouth and the Ngatiruanui further south joined him openly. Hostilities broke out in February, 1860.
It should be mentioned that while all this was going on, the Premier, Mr. Stafford, was absent in England, and that his colleagues supported the Governor"s action. Parliament did not a.s.semble until war had broken out, and then a majority of members conceived themselves bound to stand by what had been done. Nevertheless, so great was the doubt about the wisdom and equity of the purchase that most of the North Island members even then condemned it. Most of the South Island members, who had much to lose and nothing to gain by war, thought otherwise. Very heavily has their island had to pay for the Waitara purchase. It was not a crime, unless every purchaser who takes land with a bad t.i.tle which he believes to be good is a criminal. But, probably wrong technically, certainly needless and disastrous, it will always remain for New Zealand the cla.s.sic example of a blunder worse than a crime.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Chapter XVI
_TUPARA_[1] AGAINST ENFIELD
"The hills like giants at a hunting lay, Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay."
[Footnote 1: _Tupara_ (two-barrel), the Maori name for the short double-barrelled guns which were their handiest weapons against us in bush warfare.]
In 1860 the Taranaki settlement was growing to be what it now is--a very pleasant corner of the earth. Curving round the seash.o.r.e under the lofty, lonely, symmetrical cone of Egmont, it is a green land of soft air and many streams. After long delays and much hope deferred, the colonists--mostly English of the south-west counties--had begun to prosper and to line the coast with their little homesteads standing among peach orchards, gra.s.sy fields, and sometimes a garden gay with the flowers of old Devon. Upon this quiet little realm the Maoris swept down, and the labour of twenty years went up in smoke. The open country was abandoned; the settlers took refuge in their town, New Plymouth. Some 600 of their women and children were shipped off to Nelson; about twice as many more who could not be induced to leave stayed huddled up in the little town, and the necessity of keeping a strong force in the place to defend them from a sudden dash by the Maoris hampered the conduct of the campaign. Martial law was proclaimed--destined not to be withdrawn for five years. After a time the town was protected by redoubts and a line of entrenchment. Crowded and ill-drained, it became as unhealthy as uncomfortable. Whereas for sixteen months before the war there had not been a funeral in the district, they were now seen almost daily. On the alarm of some fancied Maori attack, noisy panics would break out, and the shrieks of women and cries of children embarra.s.sed husbands and brothers on whom they called for help, and whose duty as militiamen took them to their posts. The militia of settlers, numbering between four and five hundred, were soon but a minor portion of the defenders of the settlement. When fighting was seen to be inevitable, the Government sent for aid to Australia, and drew thence all the Imperial soldiers that could be spared. The Colony of Victoria, generous in the emergency, lent New Zealand the colonial sloop-of-war _Victoria_, and allowed the vessel not only to transport troops across the Tasman Sea, but to serve for many months off the Taranaki coast, asking payment for nothing except her steaming coal. By the end of the year there were some 3,000 Europeans in arms at the scene of operations, and they probably outnumbered several times over the fluctuating forces of the natives. The fighting was limited to the strip of sea-coast bounded by the Waitara on the north and the Tataramaika plain on the south, with the town of New Plymouth lying about midway between. The coast was open and surf-beaten, the land seamed by ravines or "gulleys," down which the rainfall of Egmont streamed to the sh.o.r.e. Near the sea the soil was--except in the settlers" clearings--covered with tough bracken from two to six feet high, and with other troublesome growths.
Inland the great forest, mantling the volcano"s flanks, and spreading its hara.s.sing network like a far-stretching spider"s web, checked European movements. From the first the English officers in command in this awkward country made up their minds that their men could do nothing in the meshes of the bush, and they clung to the more open strip with a caution and a profound respect for Native prowess which epithets can hardly exaggerate, and which tended to intensify the self-esteem of the Maori, never the least self-confident of warriors.
A war carried on in such a theatre and in such a temper was likely to drag. There was plenty of fighting, mostly desultory. The Maoris started out of the bush or the bracken to plunder, to cut off stragglers, or to fight, and disappeared again when luck was against them. Thirteen tiresome months saw much marching and counter-marching, frequent displays of courage--more courage than co-operation sometimes,--one or two defeats, and several rather barren successes.
For the first eight months the advantage inclined to the insurgents.
After that their overweening conceit of their Waikato contingent enabled our superior strength to a.s.sert itself. The Maoris, for all their courage and knowledge of the country, were neither clever guerillas nor good marksmen. Their tribal wars had always been affairs of sieges or hand-to-hand encounters. Half the skill displayed by them in intrenching, half the pluck they showed behind stockades, had they been devoted to hara.s.sing our soldiers on the march or to loose skirmishing by means of jungle ambuscades, might, if backed by reasonably straight shooting, have trebled our losses and difficulties.
Early in the war we did none too well in an attack upon a hill _pa_ at Waireka, a few miles south of New Plymouth. Colonel Murray was sent out from the town with some 300 troops and militia to take it, and at the same time to bring in some families of settlers who had stuck to their farms, and who, if we may believe one of them, did not want to be interfered with. The militia were sent by one route, the troops took another. The Maoris watched the arrangements from the hills, let the militia cross two difficult ravines, and then occupied these, cutting off the Taranaki contingent. The militia officers, however, kept their men together, and pa.s.sed the day exchanging shots with their enemy and waiting for Colonel Murray to make a diversion by a.s.sailing Waireka. This, however, Colonel Murray did not do. He sent Lieutenant Urquhart and thirty men to clear the ravines aforesaid, and give the militiamen a chance of retreat. But when the latter, still expecting him to attack the _pa_, did not retire, he rather coolly withdrew Urquhart"s party and retraced his steps to the town, alleging that his orders had been not to go into the bush, and, in any case, to return by dusk. Great was the excitement amongst the wives, children, and friends of the settlers away in the fight when the soldiers returned without them, and when one terrified woman, who clutched at an officer"s arm and asked their whereabouts, got for answer, "My good woman, I don"t know"! Loud was the joy when by the light of the moon the militiamen were at length seen marching in. They had been rescued without knowing it by Captain Cracroft and a party of sixty bluejackets from H.M.S. _Niger_. These, meeting Colonel Murray in his retreat, and hearing of the plight of the colonial force, pushed on in gallant indignation, and in the dusk of the evening made that a.s.sault upon the _pa_ which the Colonel had somehow not made during the day.
Climbing the hill, the sailors chanced upon a party of natives, whom they chased before them pell-mell. Reaching the stockade at the heels of the fugitives, the bluejackets gave each other "a back" and scrambled over the palisades, hot to win the 10 promised by the Captain to the first man to pull down the Maori flag. The defenders from their rifle-pits cut at their feet with tomahawks, wounding several nastily; but in a few minutes the scuffle was over, and the _Niger"s_ people returned victorious to New Plymouth in high spirits.
Moreover, their feat caused the main body of the natives to withdraw from the ravines, thus releasing the endangered militia. Among these, Captain Harry Atkinson--in after years the Colony"s Premier and best debater--had played the man. Our loss had been small--that of the natives some fifty killed and wounded.
Month followed month, and still the settlers were pent up and the province infested by the marauding Taranaki, Ngatiawa, and Ngatiruanui Maoris, and by sympathisers from Waikato, who, after planting their crops, had taken their guns and come over to New Plymouth to enjoy the sport of shooting _Pakeha_. The farms and homes of the devastated settlement lay a plundered wreck, and the owners complained bitterly of the dawdling and timidity of the Imperial officers, who on their side accused the settlers of unreason in refusing to remove their families, of insolence to Native allies and prisoners, of want of discipline, and of such selfish greed for compensation from Government that they would let their cattle be captured by natives rather than sell them to the commissariat. On the other hand, the natives were far from a happy family. The Waikato had not forgotten that they had been aforetime the conquerors of the Province, now the scene of war, that the Ngatiawa and Taranaki had been their slaves, and that Wiremu Kingi had fled to Cook"s Straits to escape their raids. They swaggered among their old foes and servants, and ostentatiously disregarded their advice, much to our advantage.
In June we were defeated at Puke-te-kauere on the Waitara. Three detachments were sent to surround and storm a _pa_ standing in the fork of a Y made by the junction of two swampy ravines. The plan broke down; the a.s.sailants went astray in the rough country and had to retreat; Lieutenant Brooks and thirty men were killed and thirty-four wounded. The Maori loss was little or nothing.
In August General Pratt came on the scene from Australia. He proceeded to destroy the plantations and to attack the _pas_ of the insurgents.
He certainly took many positions. Yet so long and laborious were his approaches by sapping, so abundant his precautions, that in no case did the natives stay to be caught in their defences. They evacuated them at the last moment, leaving the empty premises to us. Once, however, with an undue contempt for the British soldier, a contingent, newly arrived from the Waikato, occupied a dilapidated _pa_ at Mahoe-tahi on the road from New Plymouth to Waitara. Their chief, Tai Porutu, sent a laconic letter challenging the troops to come and fight. "Make haste; don"t prolong it! Make haste!" ran the epistle.
Promptly he was taken at his word. Two columns marched on Mahoe-tahi from New Plymouth and Waitara respectively. Though the old _pa_ was weak, the approaches to it were difficult, and had the Maoris waylaid the a.s.sailants on the road, they might have won. But at the favourable moment Tai Porutu was at breakfast and would not stir. He paid for his meal with his life. Caught between the 65th regiment and the militia, the Maoris were between two fires. Driven out of their _pa_, they tried to make a stand behind it in swamp and scrub. Half a dozen well-directed sh.e.l.ls sent them scampering thence to be pursued for three miles. They lost over 100, amongst whom were several chiefs.
Our killed and wounded were but 22. Here again Captain Atkinson distinguished himself. Not only did he handle his men well, but a prominent warrior fell by his hand.
This was in November, 1860. For five months General Pratt, in the face of much grumbling, went slowly on sapping and building redoubts. He always reached his empty goal; but the spectacle of British forces worming their way underground and sheltering themselves behind earthworks against the fire of a few score or hundred invisible savages who had neither artillery nor long-range rifles was not calculated to impress the public imagination.
On the 23rd January, 1861, our respectful prudence again tempted the Maoris to rashness. They tried a daybreak attack on one of the General"s redoubts. But, though they had crept into the ditch without discovery, and, scrambling thence, swarmed over the parapet with such resolution that they even gripped the bayonets of the soldiers with their hands, they were attacked, in the flank and rear, by parties running up to the rescue from neighbouring redoubts, and fled headlong, leaving fifty killed and wounded behind. In March hostilities were stopped after a not too brilliant year, in which our casualties in fighting had been 228, beside certain settlers cut off by marauders. Thompson, the king-maker, coming down from the Waikato, negotiated a truce. There seemed yet a fair hope of peace. Governor Browne had indeed issued a bellicose manifesto proclaiming his intention of stamping out the King Movement. But before this could provoke a general war, Governor Browne was recalled and Sir George Grey sent back from the Cape to save the position. Moreover, the Stafford Ministry, which headed the war party amongst colonists, fell in 1862, and Sir William Fox, the friend of peace, became Premier.
For eighteen months Grey and his Premier laboured for peace. They tried to conciliate the Kingite chiefs, who would not, for a long time, meet the Governor. They withdrew Governor Browne"s manifesto.
They offered the natives local self-government. At length the Governor even made up his mind to give back the Waitara land. But a curse seemed to cling to those unlucky acres. The proclamation of rest.i.tution was somehow delayed, and meanwhile Grey sent troops to resume possession of another Taranaki block, that of Tataramaika, which fairly belonged to the settlers, but on which Maoris were squatting. Under orders from the King natives, the Ngatiruanui retaliated by surprising and killing a party of soldiers, and the position in the province became at once hopeless. The war beginning again there in 1863 smouldered on for more than three long and wearisome years.
But the main interest soon shifted from Taranaki. In the Waikato, relations with the King"s tribes were drifting from bad to worse. Grey had been called in too late. His _mana_ was no longer the influence it had been ten years before. His diplomatic advances and offers of local government were met with sheer sulkiness. The semi-comic incident of Sir John Gorst"s newspaper skirmish at Te Awamutu did no good. Gorst was stationed there as Commissioner by the Government, as an agent of peace and conciliation. In his charge was an industrial school. It was in the heart of the King Country. The King"s advisers must needs have an organ--a broad-sheet called the _Hokioi_, a word which may be paraphrased by Phoenix. With unquestionable courage, Gorst, acting on Grey"s orders, issued a sheet in opposition, ent.i.tled _Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke_, or The Lonely Lark. Fierce was the encounter of the rival birds. The Lark out-argued the Phoenix. But the truculent Kingites had their own way of dealing with _lese majeste_. They descended on the printing-house, and carried off the press and type of _Te Pihoihoi Mokemoke_. The press they afterwards sent back to Auckland; of the type, it is said, they ultimately made bullets. Gorst, ordered to quit the King Country, refused to budge without instructions. The Maoris gave him three weeks to get them and depart, and very luckily for him Grey sent them.
The Governor pushed on a military road from Auckland to the Waikato frontier--a doubtful piece of policy, as it irritated the natives, and the Waikato country, as experience afterwards showed, could be best invaded with the help of river steamers. The steamers were, however, not procured at that stage. About the same time as the Gorst incident in the Upper Waikato, the Government tried to build a police-station and barracks on a plot of land belonging to a friendly native lower down the river. The King natives, however, forbade the erection, and, when the work went on, a party of them paddled down, seized the materials and threw them into the stream.
It was now clear that war was coming. The utmost anxiety prevailed in Auckland, which was only forty miles from the frontier and exposed to attack both from sea and land. Moreover, some hundreds of natives, living quite close to the town, had arms, and were ascertained to be in communication with the Waikatos. The Governor attempted to disarm them, but the plan was not well carried out, and most of them escaped with their weapons to the King Country. The choice of the Government then lay between attacking and being attacked. They learned, beyond a doubt, that the Waikatos were planning a march on Auckland, and in a letter written by Thompson about this time he not only stated this, but said that in the event of an a.s.sault the unarmed people would not be spared. By the middle of the year 1863, however, a strong force was concentrated on the border, just where the Waikato River, turning from its long northward course, abruptly bends westward towards the sea. No less than twelve Imperial Regiments were now in New Zealand, and their commander, General Sir Duncan Cameron, a Crimean veteran, gained a success of some note in Taranaki. He was a brave, methodical soldier, dest.i.tute of originality, nimbleness or knowledge of the country or of savage warfare. In July, the invasion of the Waikato was ordered. On the very day before our men advanced, the Maoris had begun what they meant to be their march to Auckland, and the two forces at once came into collision. In a sharp fight at Koheroa the natives were driven from their entrenchments with some loss, and any forward movement on their part was effectually stopped. But, thanks to what seemed to the colonists infuriating slowness, the advance up the Waikato was not begun until the latter part of October, and the conquest of the country not completed until February.
To understand the cause of this impatience on the part of the onlookers, it should be mentioned that our forces were now, as usual in the Maori wars, altogether overwhelming. The highest estimate of the fighting men of the King tribes is two thousand. As against this, General Cameron had ultimately rather more than ten thousand Imperial troops in the Colony to draw upon. In addition to that, the colonial militia and volunteers were gradually recruited until they numbered nearly as many. About half of these were, at any rate after a short time, quite as effectual as the regulars for the peculiar guerilla war which was being waged. In armament there was no comparison between the two sides. The _Pakeha_ had Enfield rifles and a good supply of artillery. The Maoris were armed with old Tower muskets and shot-guns, and were badly off both for powder and bullets, while, as already said, they were not very good marksmen. Their artillery consisted of two or three old ship"s guns, from which salutes might have been fired without extreme danger to their gunners. If the war in the Waikato, and its off-shoot the fighting in the Bay of Plenty, had been in thick forest and a mountainous country, the disparity of numbers and equipment might have been counterbalanced. But the Waikato country was flat or undulating, clothed in fern and with only patches of forest.
A first-cla.s.s high road--the river--ran right through it. The st.u.r.dy resistance of the natives was due first to their splendid courage and skilful use of rifle-pits and earthworks, and in the second place to our want of dash and tactical resource. Clever as the Maori engineers were, bravely as the brown warriors defended their entrenchments, their positions ought to have been nothing more than traps for them, seeing how overwhelming was the white force. The explanation of this lies in the Maori habit of taking up their positions without either provisions or water. A greatly superior enemy, therefore, had only to surround them. They then, in the course of two or three days at the outside, had either to surrender at discretion or try the desperate course of breaking through the hostile lines.
[Ill.u.s.tration: War Map]
General Cameron preferred the more slap-dash course of taking entrenchments by a.s.sault. A stubborn fight took place at Rangiriri, where the Maoris made a stand on a neck of land between the lake and the Waikato River. a.s.saulted on two sides, they were quickly driven from all their pits and earthworks except one large central redoubt.
Three times our men were sent at this, and three times, despite a fine display of courage, they were flung back with loss. The bravest soldier cannot--without wings--surmount a bank which rises eighteen feet sheer from the bottom of a broad ditch. This was seen next day.
The attack ceased at nightfall. During the dark hours the redoubt"s defenders yelled defiance, but next morning they surrendered, and, marching out, a hundred and eighty-three laid down their arms. Our loss was one hundred and thirty-two killed and wounded; the Maori loss was fifty killed, wounded unknown. By January, General Cameron had pa.s.sed beyond Ngaruawahia, the village which had been the Maori King"s head-quarters, and which stood at the fine river-junction where the brown, sluggish Waipa loses its name and waters in the light-green volume of the swifter Waikato. Twice the English beat the enemy in the triangle between the rivers. A third encounter was signalised by the most heroic incident in the Colony"s history. Some three hundred Maoris were shut up in entrenchments at a place called Orakau. Without food, except a few raw potatoes; without water; pounded at by our artillery, and under a hail of rifle bullets and hand grenades; unsuccessfully a.s.saulted no less than five times--they held out for three days, though completely surrounded. General Cameron humanely sent a flag of truce inviting them to surrender honourably. To this they made the ever-famous reply, "Enough! We fight right on, for ever!" (Heoi ano! Ka whawhai tonu, ake, ake, ake.) Then the General offered to let the women come out, and the answer was, "The women will fight as well as we." At length, on the afternoon of the third day, the garrison a.s.sembling in a body charged at quick march right through the English lines, fairly jumping (according to one account) over the heads of the men of the Fortieth Regiment as they lay behind a bank.