by Michael King
Maori too began to fear this outcome. It seemed to some chiefs that tribal culture and tikanga (customs) might be in danger of permanent extinction unless active steps were taken to preserve them. For some, a prerequisite for such preservation was a ban on further sales of Maori land. A series of meetings held in the North Island in the 1850s promoted this strategy, along with the idea that Maori should combine their mana in a Maori monarch. This movement, inspired by Te Rauparaha’s son Tamihana and his cousin Matene Te Whiwhi, arose in part from the fact that the presence of Europeans had helped to create a sense of ‘Maoriness’. It arose too from a belief that the key to the power of Europeans lay in their unity under the British Crown. If Maori could achieve a similar unity under their own king, it was argued, they would be able to match European confidence and cohesion, retain their land and preserve customary law and traditional authority. In other words, if significant numbers of tribes were able to coalesce, they would be less susceptible to divide and rule strategies on the part of Pakeha colonists.
With this object in view, the elderly and ailing Waikato chief Te Wherowhero was selected first Maori King in 1856 at a representative gathering of tribes at Pukawa on the shore of Lake Taupo. He was formally installed in the position in 1858 at his ‘capital’ at Ngaruawahia and took the name Potatau. In the eyes of most European colonists who read about this ceremony in their newspapers, it was an act of Maori disloyalty to the British Crown, as was any expression of allegiance to a Maori monarch. In the eyes of supporters of the King movement, or Kingitanga, however, the mana of the two monarchs would be complementary. Wiremu Tamihana of Ngati Haua, the ‘Kingmaker’ who anointed Potatau, voiced this view at the ‘raising-up’ ceremony: ‘The Maori King and the Queen of England to be joined in accord; God to be over them both.’
The Kingitanga came quickly to be viewed by Europeans as a blatant attempt to prevent further land sales at a time when the populations of Auckland and New Plymouth were spilling over with new colonists. Many settlers, and the Governor, Thomas Gore Browne, began to voice the opinion that Maori needed ‘a sharp lesson’ to teach them who ought to be in charge of the country. An apparent opportunity for such a lesson arose in 1859 when an Ati Awa chief, Te Teira, offered a 243-hectare block of land at Waitara, near New Plymouth, for sale to the Government. The principal chief of the area, Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitake, objected and said that Te Teira had neither the mana nor the support of Ati Awa to make the sale. But Gore Browne insisted that the transaction proceed, viewing the issue as one of sovereignty. When Wiremu Kingi’s supporters peacefully occupied the Waitara block in March 1860, they sparked the Taranaki War.
Governor Gore Browne had called in more than 3000 imperial troops from Australia, and they were commanded first by Colonel Charles Gold and subsequently by Major-General Thomas Pratt. Maori forces, by contrast, fluctuated from a few hundred to around 1500. They were commanded by Wiremu Kingi’s ‘general’, Hapurona. The early stages of the war, from March 1860, consisted of the British storming a cordon of Maori pa that usually turned out to be empty at the time of attack. On 27 June, however, the imperial troops assaulted the manned pa at Puketakauere and suffered 64 casualties while being severely defeated. Maori then tightened their cordon around New Plymouth to the point where the town was under siege and around 100 settlers died from disease in overcrowded conditions. The pressure eased only in September and October when Taranaki Maori and some Maniapoto allies returned to their home bases to help plant crops for the coming summer.
Imperial troops had a victory in November 1860 when they stormed a half-built pa at Mahoetahi. They followed this with sieges against selected pa and extending their own line by building a series of redoubts. This resulted in slow progress against Maori forces, but at enormous cost in time, lives and materials. And so Gore Browne, rather than trying to crush an uncrushable foe, opted instead for a truce in March 1861. The truce held, although fighting broke out again in May 1863 and continued sporadically for a further nine months. By that time, however, the military focus was on Waikato and the far more extensive conflict that had been provoked there.
Sir George Grey replaced Thomas Gore Browne as Governor for a second term in 1861. He was determined to put down what he saw as the threat to British authority represented by the Kingitanga. He persuaded the British Government not to recall to Australia the troops provided for the Taranaki War, and in 1862 he built a military route, the Great South Road, from Auckland to the northern Kingitanga boundary at the Mangatawhiri River in Waikato. At that boundary, a redoubt was built with telegraph communication and strong supply lines back to Auckland. In 1863 Grey used the opportunity provided by the second outbreak of fighting in Taranaki to prise further troops from the British Government. By early 1864 he had as many as 20,000 men at his disposal – imperial troops, sailors, marines, two units of regular colonial troops (the Colonial Defence Force and the Forest Rangers), Auckland and Waikato militia (the latter to be rewarded with confiscated land after the fighting), some Waikato hapu loyal to the Crown and a larger number of Maori from Te Arawa. The Kingitanga, by contrast, was able to mobilise no more than 5000 warriors, some of them from Bay of Plenty, East Coast and Tuhoe tribes, and they never had more than 2000 in the field at one time.
The invasion of Waikato began on 12 July 1863 when Lieutenant-General Duncan Cameron led his combined regular and volunteer troops across the Mangatawhiri River. The first engagement with Kingitanga forces came on 17 July at Koheroa, where a small Maori garrison was defeated. After waiting for reinforcements, Cameron moved against the pa at Meremere, which the defenders decided to evacuate without a fight. It was not until 20 November, at Rangiriri, that the first major battle of the war began.
Rangiriri was designed by Waikato Maori to hold up the British advance down the Waikato River. At the time it was attacked, however, they had not had time to garrison it fully. The first assault left the pa surrounded on three sides. Further frontal attacks failed, and most of the defenders evacuated the position on the night of 20 November. The following morning, after confusion over raising a flag of truce, 180 rearguard defenders were captured. Cameron’s forces then surged up the river and occupied the empty Kingitanga capital of Ngaruawahia on 8 December.
The next engagement was at Rangiaowhia, the centre of Waikato’s major agricultural region, on 21 February 1864. This action was seen as highly controversial in retrospect. The day was a Sunday, when Christian Maori would not fight and did not expect Pakeha troops to fight either. Further, Rangiaowhia was not a fortified position and many of the inhabitants were elderly people and children. Particular Maori offence was taken at the firing of a whare karakia or house of prayer in which a group of supposed non-combatants were killed, including one elder who had emerged to indicate that they were surrendering.
The final action in Waikato itself was the battle of Orakau on 31 March–2 April 1864. This pa was neither completed nor fully garrisoned, but it withstood three assaults. At this point the Maori commander, Rewi Maniapoto of Ngati Maniapoto, is reputed to have called out defiantly to Major William Gilbert Mair, ‘E hoa, ka whawhai tonu ahau kia koe ake, ake, ake.’ (Friend, I shall continue to fight you for ever and for ever.) Orakau was surrounded, however, and on 2 April the defenders cut their way through the British line and attempted to escape. Many were killed in the rout that followed, cut down by swords as they ran from pursuers on horseback; and many of the Maori wounded were bayoneted to death.
The final engagements of the war were near Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty. On 28 April Cameron, with 1700 troops and seventeen pieces of artillery, attacked Gate Pa, defended by 230 Maori. After a heavy bombardment, a storming party managed to get inside the pa, where it was ambushed and forced to flee. Rawiri Puhirake then evacuated his forces and rightly claimed a significant victory. Cameron had his revenge less than two months later, however, when Puhirake and his men were caught and defeated at an unfinished pa at Te Ranga.
The major engagements and dozens of ski
rmishes of the Waikato War had been responsible for over 1000 Maori and 700 European deaths. Worse than this price, however, Waikato Maori were punished by the confiscation of 1.3 million hectares of land, which further crippled and embittered the vanquished tribes. This action also secured for the New Zealand Government, as it was intended to do, the land with which to reward the militia troops and settle new colonists. What was taken was selected more for its fertility and strategic importance than for the owners’ part in the so-called rebellion: some tribes in northern Waikato who had remained loyal to the Government lost land along with those who had not; and the group that had been perhaps most bellicose in both the Waikato and Taranaki wars, Ngati Maniapoto, lost nothing (the Government showed little interest in the precipitous hills and valleys of their rohe until it wanted to push the main trunk railway line through there in the 1880s). King Tawhiao, successor to his father, Potatau, who had died in 1860, took his family and immediate entourage of followers into internal exile in the King Country, thus giving that region its Pakeha name.
The New Zealand Wars as a whole were far from over, however. As fighting in Waikato was winding down, a messianic movement, another syncretic religion, was gaining popularity in Taranaki. Pai Marire (known to Europeans as Hauhau) promised its followers deliverance from European domination. Its founder, Te Ua Haumene, identified closely with the Psalms of David in the Old Testament and wove Biblical and Maori elements into rituals that included incantation and dancing around a niu pole, a gigantic version of the traditional Maori divining stick. Te Ua apparently had no intention that his movement would become warlike (its name meant Good and Peaceful). But his followers, convinced that Pai Marire gave them spiritual weapons to overpower Europeans, also took up martial weapons. They attacked and defeated a patrol of mixed imperial and colonial forces at Te Ahuahu in North Taranaki on 6 April 1864. Just over three weeks later they launched a frontal assault on a redoubt at Sentry Hill, Te Morere, and were heavily defeated. Another Pai Marire group led by Matene Rangitauira led a force down the Whanganui River in May 1864, only to be attacked and defeated at Moutoa Island by tribes of the lower river, who were credited with saving the town of Wanganui.
Before imperial troops were dispersed from the Waikato War, Governor Grey decided to use the Pai Marire disturbances as an excuse to put down what he regarded as Maori rebellion in south Taranaki. He dispatched General Cameron and 3700 men to Wanganui, and this force moved into south Taranaki in January 1865. They had the better of engagements with Maori at Nukumaru and Te Ngaio and halted their advance at the Waingongoro River. Cameron left New Zealand soon after, and his position at the head of this, the last imperial forces campaign in New Zealand, was taken by Major-General Trevor Chute, who led a devastating series of depredations against Maori villages in January and February 1866, laying them waste and destroying crops. A similar campaign by colonial and kupapa forces was led by Thomas McDonnell between August and November 1866. These actions severely crippled Maori communities in the region, who were largely unaware of the purpose of the campaign, and led to starvation and long-enduring anger.
Meanwhile, conflict had broken out in the Bay of Plenty and on the East Coast of the North Island, sparked by the arrival of Pai Marire emissaries in those regions. Kereopa Te Rau, who had lost relatives in the action at Rangiaowhia, was involved in the killing of the missionary Carl Volkner at Opotiki in March 1865. He and his co-religionists were pursued by colonial forces and kupapa Maori. From June to October 1865, there was virtual civil war on the East Coast between Pai Marire and kupapa factions of Ngati Porou. Arawa kupapa joined colonial troops from Taranaki who arrived to fight Pai Marire forces inland from Opotiki and along the East Coast. Later fighting spilled down into Hawke’s Bay, where Ngati Kahungunu participated as both Pai Marire followers and kupapa. This series of engagements reached a climax in November 1865 at the battle of Waerenga-a-Hika in Poverty Bay. Four hundred Pai Marire supporters were taken prisoner, many of whom (with wives and children) were banished to a penal settlement on the Chatham Islands.
That action spawned another campaign. One of those arrested at Waerenga-a-Hika, Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki, was a Rongowhakaata man who had fought on the government side. He was suspected of aiding the enemy, however, and banished to the Chathams without trial. After a series of visions which led him to found the Ringatu faith, another syncretic religion, Te Kooti escaped in July 1868, having commandeered a ship which took him and 300 followers back to the mainland. After his request for a pardon was turned down, he waged the most effective guerrilla campaign ever seen in the country. He killed about 30 Europeans and at least 20 Maori men, women and children in the course of raids on Poverty Bay settlements, and was chased by kupapa and colonial troops through the East Coast, Urewera and central North Island for four years. Finally he withdrew to sanctuary in the King Country in 1872, and he was eventually pardoned by the Government in 1883. The shots fired by Gilbert Mair’s Flying Arawa column at the retreating Te Kooti in February 1872 are regarded as the last engagement of the New Zealand Wars.
If anyone offered a challenge to Te Kooti’s designation as the country’s most effective guerrilla ‘general’, however, it was Riwha Titokowaru of Ngati Ruahine in Taranaki. And his war ran in parallel with that of the Rongowhakaata prophet-fighter.
The basis for the return of fighting to Taranaki in 1868 was the Government’s gradual implementation of land confiscations provoked by the previous war. South Taranaki Maori resisted these encroachments non-violently, and then violently. Titokowaru’s forces attacked a Patea Field Force of colonial troops led by Thomas McDonnell (by now a lieutenant-colonel). McDonnell retaliated by attacking Titokowaru’s home base at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu in August 1868. The first two of his assaults were abortive, but the third, on 7 September, resulted in a full-scale battle and the defeat of McDonnell’s men. Among the casualties was McDonnell’s second-in-command, Major Gustavus von Tempsky, the Prussian-born adventurer who had served with the Forest Rangers in the Waikato campaign and participated in Chute’s scorched-earth expedition in Taranaki in 1866. He had survived a court martial in 1865 to become, in the minds of the Pakeha public, a dashing hero of the New Zealand Wars. His fearlessness and ability to survive near-misses gave him an aura of invincibility. His death came as shock to his military followers and to his wider audience of admirers throughout the colony.
After the debacle at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu, McDonnell was replaced by Lieutenant-Colonel George Whitmore, who led the Patea Field Force against Titokowaru at Moturoa, near Waverley. Again the colonial troops were soundly defeated. After this action, Belich has commented, ‘[almost] the whole of south Taranaki was abandoned to Titokowaru and the colonial army withdrew to the outskirts of Wanganui’. A showdown battle was expected at Titokowaru’s new base at Tauranga Ika, near Nukumaru, and McDonnell led almost 2000 men there early in February 1869. But the colonial troops found the pa empty. Because of some personal hara or impropriety (believed to be his liaison with another man’s wife), Titokowaru’s Maori support had collapsed suddenly and he retreated to the north, fighting rearguard actions en route. He took eventual refuge in inland north Taranaki while government forces reoccupied the south. Eventually he reached a kind of modus vivendi with Pakeha settlers and started a business selling them grass seed. Just over a decade after the fighting he was living at Te Whiti-o-Rongomai’s and Tohu Kakahi’s pa at Parihaka, where he was among the leaders arrested and imprisoned in the wake of the invasion by government troops in 1881.
The latter action was sparked by non-violent Maori resistance to European occupation of confiscated land near Parihaka. This village had attracted more than 2000 inhabitants who were disillusioned by the outcome of the Taranaki wars and who sought cultural and spiritual replenishment from the teachings of Te Whiti and Tohu. Both prophets encouraged further passive resistance to Pakeha settlement, such as pulling out survey pegs and removing fences on the land about to be occupied on the Waimate Plains. Despite Parihaka’s
pacifist ethos, many Europeans in Taranaki and elsewhere feared that the resistance campaign was a prelude to armed conflict. Native Minister John Bryce used this fear as an excuse to lead 644 troops and nearly 1000 settler volunteers into Parihaka on 5 November 1881. Instead of violence, they were met by singing children offering them food. The pa was destroyed, none the less, and Te Whiti and Tohu and other leaders arrested – but not tried – for sedition. They then endured two years of enforced exile in Otago.
The fate of the Parihaka community had been prefigured two years earlier when another prophet preaching non-violence, Te Maiharoa of Ngai Tahu, had been driven off occupied land in the Upper Waitaki Valley. Te Maiharoa believed that the only land sold to the Crown in the South Island had been that in view of the coast. In 1877 he led a heke or migration of several hundred followers from Temuka to Omarama to reoccupy old tribal grazing land. Two years later the peaceable community he had established there was dismantled and its inhabitants evicted forcibly by police. As they made their way back down the Waitaki Valley through the worst winter storms on record up to that time, several of the very old and the very young died from the effects of the freezing temperatures.
What effects did the New Zealand Wars and the resistance movements that immediately followed them have on the country as a whole? Most European New Zealanders (but not all) viewed them as a decisive demonstration that sovereignty rested with ‘the Crown’ – that is, with the New Zealand Government of the day – and not with Maori. That, after all, was their view of what the Treaty of Waitangi had been all about. There was little understanding among Pakeha at this time that Maori might feel that the Treaty had been dishonoured by the Crown in its seizure, for example, of confiscated territories; or in the many other dubious ways that governments or companies or individuals had used to acquire Maori lands or resources. The comments of Judge F. R. Chapman, sentencing Rua Kenana of Tuhoe to prison in 1917 for resisting arrest, are instructive. They voice what most Pakeha felt about the idea of Maori resistance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: