"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 seashore 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, grassy 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 Martial law was proclaimed—destined not to be withdrawn for five years.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 embarrassed 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-warVictoria, 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 shore. 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 harassing 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 assert 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 harassing 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 hillpaat 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 passed the day exchanging shots with their enemy and waiting for Colonel Murray to make a diversion by assailing 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 thepa, 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 assault upon thepawhich 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 theNiger'speople 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 shootingPakeha. 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 Puké-te-kauere on the Waitara. Three detachments were sent to surround and storm apastanding in the fork of aYmade by the junction of two swampy ravines. The plan broke down; the assailants 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 thepasof 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 dilapidatedpaat 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 oldpawas weak, the approaches to it were difficult, and had the Maoris waylaid the assailants 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 theirpa, they tried to make a stand behind it in swamp and scrub. Half a dozen well-directed shells 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 restitution 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. Hismanawas 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 theHokioi, a word which may be paraphrased by Phoenix. With unquestionable courage, Gorst, acting on Grey's orders, issued a sheet in opposition, entitledTe Pihoihoi Mokémoké, 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 withlèse majesté. They descended on the printing-house, and carried off the press and type ofTe Pihoihoi Mokémoké. 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.
War MapWar Map
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 assault 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, destitute 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. ThePakehahad 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-class high road—the river—ran right through it. The sturdy 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.
REWI, THE WAIKATO LEADERREWI, THE WAIKATO LEADERPhoto byJ. MARTIN, Auckland
General Cameron preferred the more slap-dash course of taking entrenchments by assault. 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. Assaulted 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 passed 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 assaulted 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, aké, aké, aké.) 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 assembling 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. So unexpected and amazing was their charge, that they would have got away with but slight loss had they not, when outside the lines, been headed and confronted by a force of colonial rangers and cavalry. Half of them fell; the remainder, including the celebrated war-chief Rewi, got clear away. The earthworks and the victory remained with us, but the glory of the engagement lay with those whose message of "Aké, aké, aké," will never be forgotten in New Zealand.
The country round the middle and lower Waikato was now in our hands, and the King natives were driven to the country about its upper waters. They were not followed. It was decided to attack the Tauranga tribe, which had been aiding them. Tauranga lies on the Bay of Plenty, about forty miles to the east of the Waikato. It was in the campaign which now took place there that there occurred the noted repulse at the GatePa. The Maoris, entrenched on a narrow neck of land between two swamps, were invested by our forces both in the front and rear We were, as usual, immensely the stronger in numbers. Our officers, non-commissioned officers and drummers by themselves almost equalled the garrison. After a heavy though not always very accurate bombardment, General Cameron decided to storm the works. The attacking parties of soldiers and sailors charged well enough and entered the front of the defences, and the Maoris, hopeless and endeavouring to escape, found themselves shut in by the troops in their rear. Turning, however, with the courage of despair, they flung themselves on the assailants of their front. These, seized with an extraordinary panic, ran in confusion, breaking from their officers and sweeping away their supports. The assault was completely repulsed, and was not renewed. In the night the defenders escaped through the swamps, leaving us the emptypa. Their loss was slight. Ours was one hundred and eleven, and amongst the killed were ten good officers. As a defeat it was worse than Ohaeawai, for that had been solely due to a commander's error of judgment.
The blow stung the English officers and men deeply, and they speedily avenged it. Hearing that the Tauranga warriors were entrenching themselves at Te Rangi, Colonel Greer promptly marched thither, caught them before they had completed their works, and charging into the rifle-pits with the bayonet, completely routed the Maoris. The temper of the attacking force may be judged from the fact that out of the Maori loss of one hundred and forty-five no less than one hundred and twenty-three were killed or died of wounds. The blow was decisive, and the Tauranga tribe at once submitted.
"But War, of its majestic mask laid bare,The face of naked Murder seemed to wear."
From the middle of 1864, to January, 1865, there was so little fighting that it might have been thought that the war was nearing its end. The Waikato had been cleared, and the Tauranga tribes crushed. Thompson, hopeless of further struggling ceased to resist the irresistible, made his peace with us and during the short remainder of his life was treated as became an honourable foe. Nevertheless, nearly two years of harassing guerilla warfare were in store for the Colony. Then there was to be another imperfect period of peace, or rather exhaustion, between the October, 1866, and June, 1868, when hostilities were once more to blaze up and only to die out finally in 1870. This persistency was due to several causes, of which the first was the outbreak, early in 1864, of a curious superstition, the cult of the Hau-Haus. Their doctrine would be hard to describe. It was a wilder, more debased, and more barbaric parody of Christianity than the Mormonism of Joe Smith. It was an angry reaction, a kind of savage expression of a desire to revolt alike from the Christianity and civilization of thePakehaand to found a national religion. For years it drove its votaries into purposeless outbreaks, and acts of pitiless and ferocious cruelty. By the Hau-Haus two white missionaries were murdered—outrages unknown before in New Zealand. Their murderous deeds and the reprisals these brought about gave a darker tinge to the war henceforth. Their frantic faith led to absurdities as well as horrors. They would work themselves up into frenzy by dances and incantations, and in particular by barking like dogs—hence their name. At first, they seem to have believed that the cryHau! Hau!accompanied by raising one hand above the head with palm turned to the front, would turn aside thePakeha'sbullets.
It was in April, 1864, that they first appeared in the field. A Captain Lloyd, out with a reconnoitring party in Taranaki, fell, rather carelessly, into an ambuscade, where he and six of his people were killed and a dozen wounded. When Captain Atkinson and his rangers came up at speed to the rescue, they found that the heads of the slain had been cut off and carried away. Lloyd's, it appears, was carried about the island by Hau-Hau preachers, who professed to find in it a kind of diabolical oracle, and used it with much effect in disseminating their teaching. One of these prophets, or preachers, however, had a short career. Three weeks after Lloyd's death, this man, having persuaded himself and his dupes that they were invulnerable, led them against a strong and well-garrisoned redoubt at Sentry Hill, between New Plymouth and Waitara. Early one fine morning, in solid column, they marched deliberately to within 150 yards of the fort, and before straight shooting undeceived them about the value of their charms and passes, thirty-four of the poor fanatics were lying beside their prophet in front of the redoubt. A number more were carried off hurt or dying, and thenceforward the Taranaki natives were reduced to the defensive.
In the summer of the same year another prophet met his death in the most dramatic fight of the war, that by which the friendly natives of the Wanganui district saved it from a Hau-Hau raid by a conflict fought on an island in the Wanganui River, after a fashion which would have warmed the heart of Sir Walter Scott had he been alive to hear of a combat so worthy of the clansmen in "The Fair Maid of Perth." It came about a month after the repulse at the GatePa. For months the friendlies had been guarding the passage of the river against a strong Hau-Hau force. At last, tired of waiting, they challenged the enemy to a fair fight on the island of Moutua. It was agreed that neither side should attempt to take advantage of the other by surprise or ambuscade. They landed at opposite ends of the islet. First came the friendlies, 100 strong; 50 formed their first line under three brave chiefs; 50 stood in reserve under Haimona (Simon) Hiroti; 150 friends watched them from one of the river banks. Presently the Hau-Haus sprang from their canoes on to the river-girt arena, headed by their warrior-prophet Matené (Martin). After much preliminary chanting of incantations and shouting of defiance, the Hau-Haus charged. As they came on, the friendly natives, more than half believing them to be invulnerable, fired so wildly that every shot missed. Three of the Wanganui leaders fell, and their line wavered and broke. In vain a fourth chief, Tamihana, shot a Hau-Hau with each barrel of histupara, speared a third, and cleft the skull of yet another with his tomahawk. Two bullets brought him down. It was Haimona Hiroti who saved the day. Calling on the reserve, he stopped the flying, and, rallying bravely at his appeal, they came on again. Amid a clash of tomahawks and clubbed rifles, the antagonists fought hand to hand, and fought well. At length our allies won. Fifty Hau-Haus died that day, either on the island or while they endeavoured to escape by swimming. Twenty more were wounded. The Hau-Hau leader, shot as he swam, managed to reach the further shore. "There is your fish!" said Haimona, pointing the prophet out to a henchman, who,meréin hand plunged in after him, struck him down as he staggered up the bank, and swam back with his head. His flag and ninety sovereigns were amongst the prizes of the winners in the hard trial of strength. The victors carried the bodies of their fallen chiefs back to Wanganui, where the settlers for whom they had died lined the road, standing bareheaded as the brave dead were borne past.
That three such blows as Sentry Hill, Moutua, and Te Rangi had not a more lasting effect was due, amongst other things, to the confiscation policy.
To punish the insurgent tribes, and to defray in part the cost of the war, the New Zealand Government confiscated 2,800,000 acres of native land. As a punishment it may have been justified; as a financial stroke it was to the end a failure. Coming as it did in the midst of hostilities, it did not simplify matters. Among the tribes affected it bred despair, amongst their neighbours apprehension, in England unpleasant suspicions. At first both the Governor and the Colonial Office endorsed the scheme of confiscation. Then, when Mr. Cardwell had replaced the Duke of Newcastle, the Colonial Office changed front and condemned it, and their pressure naturally induced the Governor to modify his attitude.
An angry collision followed between him and his ministers, and in November, 1864, the Ministry, whose leaders were Sir William Fox and Sir Frederick Whitaker, resigned. They were succeeded by Sir Frederick Weld, upon whose advice Grey let the confiscation go on. Weld became noted for his advocacy of what was known as the Self-reliance Policy—in other words, that the Colony should dispense with the costly and rather cumbrous Imperial forces, and trust in future to the militia and Maori auxiliaries. And, certainly, when campaigning began again in January, 1865, General Cameron seemed to do his best to convert all Colonists to Weld's view. He did indeed appear with a force upon the coast north of Wanganui. But his principal feat was the extraordinary one of consuming fifty-seven days in a march of fifty-four miles along the sea beach, to which he clung with a tenacity which made the natives scornfully name him the Lame Seagull. At the outset he pitched his camp so close to thick cover that the Maoris twice dashed at him, and though of course beaten off, despite astonishing daring, they killed or wounded forty-eight soldiers. After that the General went to the cautious extreme. He declared it was useless for regulars to follow the natives into the forest, and committed himself to the statement that two hundred natives in a stockade could stop Colonel Warre with five hundred men from joining him. He declined to assault the strong Weraroapa—the key to the west coast. He hinted depressingly that 2,000 more troops might be required from England. In vain Sir George Grey urged him to greater activity. The only result was a long and acrid correspondence between them. From this—to one who reads it now—the General seems to emerge in a damaged condition. The best that can be said for him is that he and many of his officers were sick of the war, which they regarded as an iniquitous job, and inglorious to boot. They knew that a very strong party in England, headed by the Aborigines Protection Society, were urging this view, and that the Colonial Office, under Mr. Cardwell, had veered round to the same standpoint. This is probably the true explanation of General Cameron's singular slackness. The impatience and indignation of the colonists waxed high. They had borrowed three millions of money to pay for the war. They were paying £40 a year per man for ten thousand Imperial soldiers. They naturally thought this too much for troops which did not march a mile a day.
Whatever the colonists thought of Grey's warfare with his ministers, they were heartily with him in his endeavours to quicken the slow dragging on of the military operations. He did not confine himself to exhortation. He made up his mind to attack the Weraroapahimself. General Cameron let him have two hundred soldiers to act as a moral support. With these, and somewhat less than five hundred militia and friendly Maoris, the Governor sat down before the fort, which rose on a high, steep kind of plateau, above a small river. But though too strong for front attack, it was itself liable to be commanded from an outwork on a yet higher spur of the hills. Bringing common sense to bear, Grey quietly despatched a party, which captured this, and with it a strong reinforcement about to join the garrison. The latter fled, and the bloodless capture of Weraroa was justly regarded as among the most brilliant feats of the whole war. The credit fairly belonged to Grey, who showed, not only skill, but signal personal daring. The authorities at home must be assumed to have appreciated this really fine feat of his, for they made the officer commanding the two hundred moral supports a C.B. But Grey, it is needless to say, by thus trumping the trick of his opponent the General, did not improve his own relations with the Home authorities. He did, however, furnish another strong reason for a self-reliant policy. Ultimately, though gradually, the Imperial troops were withdrawn, and the colonists carried on the war with their own men, as well as their own money.
MAJOR KEMP MEIHA KEPA TE RANGI-HIWINUIMAJOR KEMPMEIHA KEPA TE RANGI-HIWINUI
In January, 1866, however, after General Cameron had by resignation escaped from a disagreeable position, but while the withdrawal of the troops was still incomplete, his successor, General Chute, showed that under officers of determination and energy British soldiers are by no means feeble folk even in the intricacies of the New Zealand bush. Setting out from the Weraroa aforesaid on January 3rd with three companies of regulars, a force of militia, and 300 Maoris under the chief Kepa, or Kemp, he began to march northward through the forest to New Plymouth. At first following the coast he captured variouspasby the way, including a strong position at Otapawa, which was fairly stormed in the face of a stout defence, during which both sides suffered more than a little. There, when one of the buttons on Chute's coat was cut off by a bullet, he merely snapped out the remark, "The niggers seem to have found me out." Both the coolness and the words used were characteristic of the hard but capable soldier. Further on the route Kemp in one day of running skirmishes took seven villages. Arriving at the southern side of Mount Egmont, the General decided to march round its inland flank through a country then almost unknown except to a few missionaries. Encumbered with pack-horses, who were checked by every flooded stream, the expedition took seven days to accomplish the sixty miles of the journey. But they did it, and met no worse foes than continual rain, short commons, deep mud, and the gloomy silence of the saturated forest, which then spread without a break over a country now almost entirely taken up by thriving dairy-farmers. Turning south again from New Plymouth by the coast-road, Chute had to fight but once in completing a march right round Mount Egmont, and thenceforward, except on its southern verge, long-distracted Taranaki saw no more campaigning.
Other districts were less fortunate. By the early part of 1865 the Hau-Hau craze was at work on the east as well as the west coast. It was in the country round the Wanganui River to the west, and in the part of the east coast, between Tauranga on the Bay of Plenty and Hawkes Bay, that the new mischief gave the most trouble. The task of coping with it devolved on the New Zealand Militia, and the warriors of certain friendly tribes, headed by the chiefs called by the Europeans Ropata and Kemp. In this loose and desultory but exceedingly arduous warfare, the irregulars and friendlies undoubtedly proved far more efficient than the regular troops had usually been permitted to be. They did not think it useless to follow the enemy into the bush; far from it. They went there to seek him out. They could march many miles in a day, and were not fastidious as to commissariat. More than once they gained food and quarters for the night by taking them from their opponents. In a multitude of skirmishes in 1865 and 1866, they were almost uniformly victorious. Of the laurels gained in New Zealand warfare, a large share belongs to Ropata, to Kemp, and to Militia officers like Tuke, McDonnell and Fraser. Later in the war, when energetic officers tried to get equally good results out of inexperienced volunteers, and when, too—in some cases—militia discipline had slackened, the consequences were by no means so satisfactory. It did not follow that brave men ready to plunge into the bush were good irregulars merely because they were not regulars. Nor were all friendly natives by any means as effective as the Wanganui and Ngatiporou, or all chiefs as serviceable as Ropata and Kemp.
The east coast troubles began in March, 1865, with the murder at Opotiki, on the Bay of Plenty, of Mr. Volckner, a missionary and the most kindly and inoffensive of mankind. At the bidding of Kereopa, a Hau-Hau emissary, the missionary's people suddenly turned on him, hung him, hacked his body to pieces, and smeared themselves with his blood. At another spot in the same Bay a trading schooner was seized just afterwards by order of another Hau-Hau fanatic, and all on board killed save two half-caste boys. A force of militia soon dealt out condign punishment for these misdeeds, but meanwhile Kereopa and his fellow fire-brands had passed down the coast and kindled a flame which gradually crept southward even to Hawkes Bay. In village after village the fire blazed up, and a rising equal to that in the Waikato seemed imminent. It was, indeed, fortunate that much the ablest warrior on that side of the island at once declared against the craze. This was Ropata Te Wahawaha, then and afterwards the most valuable Maori ally the Government had, and one of the very few captains on either side who went through the wars without anything that could be called a defeat. Without fear or pity, he was a warrior of the older Maori type, who with equal enjoyment could plan a campaign, join in a hand-to-hand tussle, doom a captive to death, or shoot a deserter with his own rifle. As he would not join the Hau-Haus, they and their converts made the mistake of attacking him. After beating them off he was joined by Major Biggs and a company of militia. Together they advanced against the stronghold of the insurgents, perched on a cliff among the Waiapu hills. By scaling a precipice with twenty picked men, Ropata and Biggs gained a crest above thepa, whence they could fire down into the midst of their astonished adversaries, over 400 of whom surrendered in terror to the daring handful. But the mischief had run down the coast. Spreading from point to point, dying down and then starting up, it was as hard to put out as fire abroad in the fern. The amiable Kereopa visited Poverty Bay, three days' journey south of the Waiapu, and tried hard to persuade the natives to murder Bishop Williams, the translator of the Scriptures into Maori. Though they shrank from this, the Bishop had to fly, and his flock took up arms, stood a siege in one of theirpas, and lost over a hundred men before they would surrender to the militia. Further south still the next rising flared up on the northern frontier of the Hawkes Bay province. Once more Ropata stamped it under, and the generalship with which he repaired the mistakes made by others, and routed a body of 500 insurgents was not more remarkable than the cold-blooded promptitude with which after the fight he shot four prisoners of note with his own hand. It took ten months for the spluttering fire to flame up again. Then it was yet another stage further south, within a few miles of Napier, amid pastoral plains, where, if anywhere, peace, it would seem, should have an abiding-place. The rising there was but a short one-act play. To Colonel Whitmore belonged the credit of dealing it a first and final blow at Omaranui, where, with a hastily raised force of volunteers, and some rather useless friendlies, he went straight at the insurgents, caught them in the open, and quickly killed, wounded, or captured over ninety per cent. of their number.
After this there was a kind of insecure tranquillity until June, 1868. Then fighting began again near the coast between Wanganui and Mount Egmont, where the occupation of confiscated lands bred bitter feelings. Natives were arrested for horse-stealing. Straggling settlers were shot. A chief, Titokowaru, hitherto insignificant, became the head and front of the resistance. In June a sudden attack was made by his people upon some militia holding a tumble-down redoubt—an attack so desperate that out of twenty-three in the work, only six remained unwounded when help came, after two hours' manful resistance. Colonel McDonnell, then in command on the coast, had proved his dash and bravery in a score of bush-fights. In his various encounters he killed ten Maoris with his own hand. He was an expert bushman, and a capital manager of the friendly natives. But during the eighteen months of quiet the trained militia which had done such excellent work in 1865 and 1866, had been in part dispersed. The force which in July McDonnell led into the bush to attempt Titokowaru'spa, at Ngutu-o-te-manu (Beak-of-the-bird) was to a large extent raw material. The Hau-Haus were found fully prepared. Skilfully posted, they poured in a hot cross-fire, both from thepaand from an ambush in the neighbouring thickets. Broken into two bodies, McDonnell's men were driven to make a long and painful retreat, during which two died of exhaustion. They lost twenty-four killed and twenty-six wounded. McDonnell resigned in disgust. Whitmore, who replaced him, demanded better men, and got them, but to meet no better success. At Moturoa his assault on another forest stockade failed under a withering fire; the native contingent held back sulkily; and again our men retreated, with a loss this time of forty-seven, of which twenty-one were killed. This was on November 5th. Before Whitmore could try again he was called to the other side of the island by evil tidings from Poverty Bay.
These had their cause in the strangest story of the Maori wars. Amongst the many blunders in these, some of the oddest were the displays of rank carelessness which repeatedly led to the escape of Maori prisoners. Three times did large bodies get away and rejoin their tribes—once from Sir George Grey's island estate at Kawau, where they had been turned loose on parole; once from a hulk in Wellington Harbour, through one of the port-holes of which they slipped into the sea on a stormy night; the third time from the Chatham Islands. This last escape, which was in July, 1868, was fraught with grave mischief.
Fruitlessly the officer in charge of prisoners there had protested against being left with twenty men to control three hundred and thirty captives. The leader of these, Te Kooti, one of the ablest as well as most ferocious partisans the colonists ever had to face, had been deported from Poverty Bay to the Chathams two years before, without trial. Unlike most of his fellow prisoners he had never borne arms against us. The charge against him was that he was in communication with Hau-Hau insurgents in 1865. His real offence seems to have been that he was regarded by some of the Poverty Bay settlers as a disagreeable, thievish, disaffected fellow, and there is an uncomfortable doubt as to whether he deserved his punishment. During his exile he vowed vengeance against those who had denounced him, and against one man in particular. In July, 1868, the schoonerRiflemanwas sent down to the Chathams with supplies. The prisoners took the chance thus offered. They surprised the weak guard, killed a sentry who showed fight, and seized and tied up the others, letting the women and children escape unharmed. Going on board theRifleman, Te Kooti gave the crew the choice between taking his people to New Zealand and instant death. They chose the former, and the schooner set sail for the east coast of New Zealand with about one hundred and sixty fighting men, and a number of women and children. The outbreak and departure were successfully managed in less than two hours. When head winds checked the runaways, Te Kooti ordered an old man, his uncle, to be bound and thrown overboard as a sacrifice to the god of winds and storms. The unhappy human sacrifice struggled for awhile in the sea and then sank. At once the wind changed, the schooner lay her course, and themanaof Te Kooti grew great. After sailing for a week, the fugitives had their reward, and were landed at Wharé-onga-onga (Abode-of-stinging-nettles), fifteen miles from Poverty Bay. They kept their word to the crew, whom they allowed to take their vessel and go scot-free. Then they made for the interior. Major Biggs, the Poverty Bay magistrate, got together a force of friendly natives and went in pursuit. The Hau-Haus showed their teeth to such effect that the pursuers would not come to close quarters. Even less successful was the attempt of a small band of White volunteers. They placed themselves across Te Kooti's path; but after a long day's skirmishing were scattered in retreat, losing their baggage, ammunition, and horses. Colonel Whitmore, picking them up next day, joined them to his force and dragged them off after him in pursuit of the victors. It was winter, and the weather and country both of the roughest. The exhausted volunteers, irritated by Whitmore's manner, left him half-way. For himself the little colonel, all wire and leather, knew not fatigue. But even the best of his men were pretty well worn out when they did at last catch a Tartar in the shape of the enemy's rearguard. The latter made a stand under cover, in an angle of the narrow bed of a mountain-torrent floored with boulders and shut in by cliffs. Our men, asked to charge in single file, hung back, and a party of Native allies sent round to take the Hau Haus in flank made off altogether. Though Te Kooti was shot through the foot, the pursuit had to be given up. The net result of the various skirmishes with him had been that we had lost twenty-six killed and wounded, and that he had got away.
Whitmore went away to take command on the west coast. Thus Te Kooti gained time to send messengers to the tribes, and many joined him. He spoke of himself as God's instrument against thePakeha, preached eloquently, and kept strict discipline amongst his men. In November, after a three months' lull, he made his swoop on his hated enemies the settlers in Poverty Bay, and in a night surprise took bloody vengeance for his sojourn at the Chathams. His followers massacred thirty-three white men, women and children, and thirty-seven natives. Major Biggs was shot at the door of his house. Captain Wilson held out in his till it was in flames. Then he surrendered under promise of life for his family, all of whom, however, were at once bayonetted, except a boy who slipped into the scrub unnoticed. McCulloch, a farmer, was shot as he sat milking. Several fugitives owed their lives to the heroism of a friendly chief, Tutari, who refused to gain his life by telling their pursuers the path they had taken. The Hau Haus killed him and seized his wife, who, however, adroitly saved both the flying settlers and herself by pointing out the wrong track. Lieutenant Gascoigne with a hasty levy of friendly Natives set out after the murderers, only to be easily held in check at Makaretu with a loss of twenty-eight killed and wounded. Te Kooti, moreover, intercepted an ammunition train and captured eight kegs of gunpowder. Fortifying himself on a precipitous forest-clad hill named Ngatapa, he seemed likely to rally round him the disaffected of his race. But his red star was about to wane. Ropata with his Ngatiporou now came on the scene. A second attack on Makaretu sent the insurgents flying. They left thirty-seven dead behind, for Ropata gave no quarter, and had not his men loitered to plunder, Te Kooti, who, still lame, was carried off on a woman's back, must have been among their prizes. Pushing on to Ngatapa, Ropata found it a very formidable stronghold. Thepawas on the summit of an abrupt hill, steep and scarped on two sides, narrowing to a razor-backed ridge in the rear. In front three lines of earthwork rose one above another, the highest fourteen feet high, aided and connected by the usual rifle-pits and covered way. Most of Ropata's men refused to follow him against such a robbers' nest, and though the fearless chief tried to take it with the faithful minority, he had to fall back, under cover of darkness, and return home in a towering passion. A month later his turn came. Whitmore arrived. Joining their forces, he and Ropata invested Ngatapa closely, attacked it in front and rear, and took the lowest of the three lines of intrenchment. A final assault was to come next morning. The Hau Haus were short of food and water, and in a desperate plight. But one cliff had been left unwatched, and over that they lowered themselves by ropes as the storming party outside sat waiting for the grey dawn. They were not, however, to escape unscathed. Ropata at once sent his men in chase. Hungry and thirsty, the fugitives straggled loosely, and were cut down by scores or brought back. Short shrift was theirs. The Government had decided that Poverty Bay must be revenged, and the prisoners were forthwith shot, and their bodies stripped and tossed over a cliff. From first to last at Ngatapa the loss to the Hau Haus was 136 killed outright, ours but 22, half of whom were wounded only. It was the last important engagement fought in New Zealand, and ended all fear of a general rising. Yet in one respect the success was incomplete: Te Kooti once more escaped. This time he reached the fastnesses of the wild Urewera tribe, and made more than one bloodstained raid thence. In April he pounced on Mohaka, at the northern end of the Hawkes Bay Province, killed seven whites, fooled the occupants of a Nativepainto opening their gates to him, and then massacred 57 of them. But the collapse of the insurrection on the West Coast enabled attention to be concentrated upon the marauder. He fell back on the plateau round Lake Taupo. There, in June, 1869, he outwitted a party of militia-men by making his men enter their camp, pretending to be friendlies. When the befooled troopers saw the trick and tried to seize their arms, nine were cut down. McDonnell, however, was at the heels of the Hau Haus, and in three encounters in the Taupo region Te Kooti was soundly beaten with a loss of 50 killed. He became a hunted fugitive. Ropata and Kemp chased him from district to district, backwards and forwards, across and about the island, for a high price had been put on his head. For three years the pursuit was urged or renewed. Every band Te Kooti got together was scattered. His wife was taken; once he himself was shot in the hand; again and again the hunters were within a few yards of their game. Crossing snow-clad ranges, wading up the beds of mountain torrents, hacking paths through the tangled forest, they were ever on his track, only to miss him. It was in the Uriwera wilderness that Te Kooti lost his congenially bloodthirsty crony Kereopa, who was caught there and hung. Left almost without followers, he himself at last took refuge in the King Country, where he stayed quiet and unmolested. In the end he received a pardon, and died in peace after living for some twenty years after his hunters had abandoned their chase.
Colonel Whitmore, crossing to the Wanganui district after the fall of Ngatapa, had set off to deal with Titokowaru. He, however, threw up the game and fled to the interior, where he was wisely left alone, and, except for the fruitless pursuit of Te Kooti, the year 1870 may be marked as the end of warfare in New Zealand.
The interest of the Maori struggle, thus concluded, does not spring from the numbers engaged. To a European eye the combats were in point of size mere battles of the frogs and mice. What gave them interest was their peculiar and picturesque setting, the local difficulties to be met, and the boldness, rising at moments to heroism, with which clusters of badly armed savages met again and again the finest fighting men of Europe. It was the race conflict which gave dignity to what Lieutenant Gudgeon in his chronicle truthfully reduces to "expeditions and skirmishes grandiloquently styled campaigns". Out of a multitude of fights between 1843 and 1870, thirty-seven (exclusive of the raid on Poverty Bay, which was a massacre) may be classed as of greater importance than the rest. Out of these we were unmistakably beaten nine times, and a tenth encounter, that of Okaihau, was indecisive. Of twenty-seven victories, however, those of Rangi-riri and Orakau were dearly bought; in the double fight at Nukumaru we lost more than the enemy, and at Waireka most of our forces retreated, and only heard of the success from a distance. Two disasters and six successes were wholly or almost wholly the work of native auxiliaries. The cleverness and daring of the Maori also scored in the repeated escapes of batches of prisoners.
By 1870 it was possible to try and count the cost of the ten years' conflict. It was not so easy to do so correctly. The killed alone amounted to about 800 on the English side and 1,800 on the part of the beaten natives. Added to the thousands wounded, there had been many scores of "murders" and heavy losses from disease, exposure and hardship. The Maoris were, for the most part, left without hope and without self-confidence. The missionaries never fully regained their old moral hold upon the race, nor has it shown much zeal and enthusiasm in industrial progress. On the other side, the colonists had spent between three and four millions in fighting, and for more than fifteen years after the war they had to keep up an expensive force of armed police. There had been destruction of property in many parts of the North Island, and an even more disastrous loss of security and paralysis of settlement. Since 1865, moreover, the pastoral industry in the south had been depressed by bad prices. It is true that some millions of acres of Maori land had been gained by confiscation, but of this portions were handed over to loyal natives. Much more was ultimately given back to the insurgent tribes, and the settlement of the rest was naturally a tardy and difficult process. Farmers do not rush upon land to be the mark of revengeful raids. The opening of the year 1870 was one of New Zealand's dark hours.
Nevertheless, had the colonists but known it, the great native difficulty was destined to melt fast away. Out of the innumerable perplexities, difficulties, and errors of the previous generation, a really capable Native Minister had been evolved. This was Sir Donald McLean, who, from the beginning of 1869 to the end of 1876, took the almost entire direction of the native policy. A burly, patient, kindly-natured Highlander, his Celtic blood helped him to sympathize with the proud, warlike, clannish nature of the Maori. It was largely owing to his influence that Ropata and others aided us so actively against Te Kooti. It was not, however, as a war minister, but as the man who established complete and lasting peace through New Zealand, that his name should be remembered. By liberal payment for service, by skilful land purchases, by showing respect to the chiefs, and tact and good humour with the people, McLean acquired a permanent influence over the race. The war party in the Colony might sneer at his "Flour and Sugar Policy"; but even the dullest had come to see by this time that peace paid. Into the remnant of the King Country McLean never tried to carry authority. He left that and the Urewera country further east discreetly alone. Elsewhere the Queen's writ ran, and roads, railways, and telegraphs, coming together with a great tide of settlement, made the era of war seem like an evil dream. It is true that the delays in redeeming promises concerning reserves to be made and given back from the confiscated Maori territory were allowed to remain a grievance for more than another decade, and led, as late as 1880, to interference by the natives with road making in some of this lost land of theirs in Taranaki. There, round a prophet named Te Whiti, flocked numbers of natives sore with a sense of injustice. Though Te Whiti was as pacific as eccentric, the Government, swayed by the alarm and irritation thus aroused, took the extreme step of pouring into his village of Parihaka an overwhelming armed force. Then, after reading the Riot Act to a passive and orderly crowd of men, women and children, they proceeded to make wholesale arrests, to evict the villagers and to destroy houses and crops. Public opinion, which had conjured up the phantom of an imminent native rising, supported the proceeding. There was no such danger, for the natives were virtually not supplied with arms, and the writer is one of a minority of New Zealanders who thinks that our neglect to make the reserves put us in the wrong in the affair. However, as the breaking up of Parihaka was at last followed up by an honourable and liberal settlement of the long-delayed Reserves question, it may be classed as the last of the long series of native alarms. There will be no more Maori wars. Unfortunately, it has become a question whether in a hundred years there will be any more Maoris. They were perhaps, seventy thousand when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed; they and the half-castes can scarcely muster forty-three thousand now.
"Fortune, they say, flies from us: she but wheelsLike the fleet sea-bird round the fowler's skiff,Lost in the mist one moment, and the nextBrushing the white sail with a whiter wingAs if to court the aim. Experience watches,And has her on the turn."
When the Waitara war broke out the white population did not number more than seventy-five thousand. When Te Kooti was chased into the King Country it had grown to nearly four times that sum, in the face of debt, doubt, and the paralyzing effects of war. A great ally of settlement had come upon the scene. In 1861 profitable goldfields were discovered in Otago. The little Free Church colony, which in thirteen years had scarcely increased to that number of thousands, was thunderstruck at the news. For years there had been rumours of gold in the river beds and amongst the mountains of the South Island. From 1857 to 1860 about £150,000 had been won in Nelson. In 1858, a certain Asiatic, Edward Peters, known to his familiars as Black Pete, who had somehow wandered from his native Bombay through Australia to Otago, had struck gold there; and in March, 1861, there was a rush to a short-lived goldfield at the Lindis, another spot in that province. But it was not until the winter of that year that the prospector, Gabriel Read, found in a gully at Tuapeka the indubitable signs of a good alluvial field. Digging with a butcher's knife, he collected in ten hours nearly five-and-twenty pounds' worth of the yellow metal. Then he sunk hole after hole for some distance, finding gold in all. Unlike most discoverers, Read made no attempt to keep his fortune to himself, but wrote frankly of it to Sir John Richardson, the superintendent of the province. For this he was ultimately paid the not extravagant reward of £1,000. The good Presbyterians of Dunedin hardly knew in what spirit to receive the tidings. But some of them did not hesitate to test the field. Very soberly, almost in sad solemnity, they set to work there, and the result solved all doubts. Half Dunedin rushed to Tuapeka. At one of the country kirks the congregation was reduced to the minister and precentor. The news went across the seas. Diggers from Australia and elsewhere poured in by the thousand. Before many months the province's population had doubled, and the prayerful and painful era of caution, the day of small things, was whisked away in a whirl of Victorian enterprise. For the next few years the history of Otago became a series of rushes. Economically, no doubt, "rush" is the proper word to apply to the old stampedes to colonial goldfields. But in New Zealand, at any rate, the physical methods of progression thither were laborious in the extreme. The would-be miner tramped slowly and painfully along, carrying as much in the way of provisions and tools as his back would bear. Lucky was the man who had a horse to ride, or the rudest cart to drive in. When, as time went on, gold was found high up the streams amongst the ice-cold rivers and bleak tussock-covered mountains of the interior, the hardships endured by the gold-seekers were often very great. The country was treeless and wind-swept. Sheep roamed over the tussocks, but of other provisions there were none. Hungry diggers were thankful to pay half a crown for enough flour to fill a tin pannikin. £120 a ton was charged for carting goods from Dunedin. Not only did fuel fetch siege prices, but five pounds would be paid for an old gin-case, for the boards of a dray, or any few pieces of wood out of which a miner's "cradle" could be patched up. The miners did not exactly make light of these obstacles, for, of the thousands who poured into the province after the first discoveries, large numbers fled from the snow and starvation of the winters, when the swollen rivers rose, and covered up the rich drift on the beaches under their banks. But enough remained to carry on the work of prospecting, and the finds were rich enough to lure new-comers. In the year 1863 the export of gold from Otago rose to more than two millions sterling. Extraordinary patches were found in the sands and drift of the mountain torrents. It is recorded of one party that, when crossing a river, their dog was swept away by the current on to a small rocky point. A digger went to rescue it, and never was humanity more promptly rewarded, for from the sands by the rock he unearthed more than £1,000 worth of gold before nightfall. Some of the more fortunate prospectors had their footsteps dogged by watchful bands bent on sharing their good luck. One of them, however, named Fox, managed to elude this espionage for some time, and it was the Government geologist—now Sir James Hector—who, while on a scientific journey, discovered him and some forty companions quietly working in a lonely valley.
The goldfields of Otago had scarcely reached the zenith of their prosperity before equally rich finds were reported from the west coast of the Canterbury province. From the year 1860 it was known that gold existed there, but the difficulties of exploring a strip of broken surf-beaten coast, cut off from settled districts by range upon range of Alps, and itself made up of precipitous hills, and valleys covered with densest jungle and cloven by the gorges of bitterly cold and impassable torrents, were exceptionally great. More than one of the Government officers sent there to explore were either swept away by some torrent or came back half-crippled by hunger and rheumatism. One surveyor who stuck to his work for months in the soaking, cheerless bush, existing on birds, bush-rats, and roots, was thought a hero, and with cause. Even Maoris dreaded parts of this wilderness, and believed it to be the abode of dragons and a lost tribe of their own race. They valued it chiefly as the home of their much-prized jade or greenstone. Searching for this, a party of them, early in 1864, found gold. Later on in the same year a certain Albert Hunt also found paying gold on the Greenstone creek. Hunt was afterwards denounced as an impostor, and had to fly for his life from a mob of enraged and disappointed gold-seekers; but the gold was there nevertheless. In 1865 the stream which had been pouring into Otago was diverted to the new fields in Westland, and in parties or singly, in the face of almost incredible natural difficulties, adventurous men worked their way to every point of the west coast. In a few months 30,000 diggers were searching its beaches and valleys with such results that it seemed astonishing that the gold could have lain unseen so long. Many lost their lives, drowned in the rivers or starved to death in the dripping bush. The price of provisions at times went to fabulous heights, as much as £150 being paid for a ton of flour, and a shilling apiece for candles. What did prices matter to men who were getting from 1 oz. to 1 lb. weight of gold-dust a day, or who could stagger the gold-buyers sent to their camps by the bankers by pouring out washed gold by the pannikin? So rich was the wash-dirt in many of the valleys, and the black sand on many of the sea-beaches, that for years £8 to £10 a week was regarded as only a fair living wage. In 1866 the west coast exported gold to the value of £2,140,000.
On a strip of sand-bank between the dank bush and the bar-bound mouth of the Hokitika river a mushroom city sprang up, starting into a bustling life of cheerful rashness and great expectations. In 1864 a few tents were pitched on the place; in 1865 one of the largest towns in New Zealand was to be seen. Wood and canvas were the building materials—the wood unseasoned pine, smelling fresh and resinous at first, anon shrinking, warping, and entailing cracked walls, creaking doors, and rattling window-sashes. Every second building was a grog-shanty, where liquor, more or less fiery, was retailed at a shilling a glass, and the traveller might hire a blanket and a soft plank on the floor for three shillings a night. Under a rainfall of more than 100 inches a year, tracks became sloughs before they could be turned into streets and roads. All the rivers on the coast were bar-bound. Food and supplies came by sea, and many were the coasting-craft which broke their backs crossing the bars, or which ended their working-life on shoals. Yet when hundreds of adventurers were willing to pay £5 apiece for the twelve hours' passage from Nelson, high rates of insurance did not deter ship-owners. River floods joined the surf in making difficulties. Eligible town sections bought at speculative prices were sometimes washed out to sea, and a river now runs over the first site of the prosperous town of Westport.
It was striking to note how quickly things settled down into a very tolerable kind of rough order. Among the diggers themselves there was little crime or even violence. It is true that a Greymouth storekeeper when asked "How's trade?" concisely pictured a temporary stagnation by gloomily remarking, "There ain't bin a fight for a week!" But an occasional bout of fisticuffs and a good deal of drinking and gambling, were about the worst sins of the gold-seekers. Any one who objected to be saluted as "mate!" or who was crazy enough to dream of wearing a long black coat or a tall black hat, would find life harassing at the diggings. But, at any rate, in New Zealand diggers did not use revolvers with the playful frequency of the Californians of Mr. Bret Harte. Nor did they shoe the horse of their first Member of Parliament with gold, or do a variety of the odd things done in Australian gold-fields. They laughed heartily when the Canterbury Provincial Government sent over the Alps an escort of strapping mounted policemen, armed to the teeth, to carry away gold securely in a bullet-proof cart. They preferred to send their gold away in peaceful coasting steamers. When, in 1867, one or two Irish rows were dignified with the title of Fenian Riots, and a company of militia were sent down from their more serious Maori work in the North Island to restore order in Hokitika, they encountered nothing more dangerous than a hospitality too lavish even for their powers of absorption. One gang of bushrangers, and one only, ever disturbed the coast. The four ruffians who composed it murdered at least six men before they were hunted down. Three were hung; the fourth, who saved his neck by turning Queen's evidence, was not lynched. No one ever has been lynched in New Zealand. For the rest the ordinary police-constable was always able to deal with the sharpers, drunkards, and petty thieves who are among the camp-followers of every army of gold-seekers. So quietly were officials submitted to that sometimes, when a police-magistrate failed to appear in a goldfields' court through some accident of road or river, his clerk would calmly hear cases and impose fines, or a police-sergeant remand the accused without authority and without resistance. In the staid Westland of to-day it is so impossible to find offenders enough to make a show of filling the Hokitika prison that the Premier, who sits for Hokitika, is upbraided in Parliament for sinful extravagance in not closing the establishment.
No sooner had the cream been skimmed off the southern goldfields than yields of almost equal value were reported from the north. The Thames and Coromandel fields in the east of the Auckland province differed from those in the South Island. They were from the outset not alluvial but quartz mines. So rich, however, were some of the Thames mines that the excitement they caused was as great as that roused by the alluvial patches of Otago and Westland. The opening up of the Northern fields was retarded throughout the sixties by Maori wars, and the demands of peaceful but hard-fisted Maori landlords. £1 a miner had to be paid to these latter for the right to prospect their country. They delayed the opening of the now famous Ohinemuri field until 1875. When on March 3rd of that year the Goldfields' Warden declared Ohinemuri open, the declaration was made to an excited crowd of hundreds of prospectors, who pushed jostling and fighting round the Warden's table for their licenses, and then galloped off on horseback across country in a wild race to be first to "peg out" claims. Years before this, however, the shores of the Hauraki Gulf had been systematically worked, and in 1871 the gold export from Auckland had risen to more than £1,100,000.
New Zealand still remains a gold-producing colony, albeit the days of the solitary adventurer working in the wash-dirt of his claim with pick, shovel, and cradle are pretty nearly over. The nomadic digger who called no man master is a steady-going wage-earner now. Coal-mines and quartz-reefs are the mainstays of Westland. Company management, trade unions, conciliation cases, and laws against Sunday labour have succeeded the rough, free-and-easy days of glittering possibilities for everybody. Even the alluvial fields are now systematically worked by hydraulic sluicing companies. They are no longer poor men's diggings. In Otago steam-dredges successfully search the river bottoms. In quartz-mining the capitalist has always been the organizing and controlling power. The application of cyanide and other scientific improvements has revived this branch of mining within the last four years, and, despite the bursting of the usual number of bubbles, there is good reason to suppose that the £54,000,000 which is so far the approximate yield of gold from the Colony will during the next decade be swelled by many millions.
The gold-digger is found in many parts of the earth; the gum-digger belongs to New Zealand alone. With spade, knife, and gum-spear he wanders over certain tracts of the province of Auckland, especially the long, deeply-indented, broken peninsula, which is the northern end of New Zealand. The so-called gum for which he searches is the turpentine, which, oozing out of the trunk of the kauri pines, hardens into lumps of an amber-like resin. Its many shades of colour darken from white through every kind of yellow and brown to jet. A little is clear, most is clouded. Half a century ago, when the English soldiers campaigning against Heké had to spend rainy nights in the bush without tent or fire, they made shift to get light and even warmth by kindling flame with pieces of the kauri gum, which in those days could be seen lying about on the ground's surface. Still, the chips and scraps which remain when kauri-gum has been cleaned and scraped for market are used in the making of fire-kindlers. But for the resin itself a better use was long ago found—the manufacture of varnish. At the moment when, under Governor Fitzroy, the infant Auckland settlement was at its lowest, a demand for kauri-gum from the United States shone as a gleam of hope to the settlers, while the Maoris near the town became too busied in picking up gum to trouble themselves about appeals to join Heké's crusade against thePakeha. Though the trade seemed to die away so completely that in a book written in 1848 I find it briefly dismissed with the words, "The bubble has burst," nevertheless it is to-day well-nigh as brisk as ever, and has many a time and oft stood Auckland in good stead.