The Building of Orakau Pa.

No need here to repeat the story of the gradual forcing back of the Kingites, from fort to fort and camp to camp. I take up the story on the gentle mound of Rangataua, at Orākau, the Place of Trees. There, at the end of March, 1864, three hundred and ten Maoris of various tribes, with many women among them—and even some children—mustered to build a kind of challenge redoubt, a final gesture of defiance and of love for the lands they were losing. (The Urewera, it was true, were not in danger of losing any land, but they were ready to give their lives in the cause of their fellow-Maoris.) Rewi really was forced into the desperate affair against his own better judgment. He had his doubts from the beginning; he saw with the eye of a practised soldier the unsuitability of the site which the old men had selected for a pa. The venerable Te Paeata, chief of Ngati-Tekohera and Ngati-Raukawa, struck his staff on the ground at Orākau and said: “This is my land; let me die here.” Rewi urged the Urewera to return to their mountains. But their leader replied: “We are carrying heavy burdens [guns and ammunition] and we must use them; we have come a long way.” Of Rewi's own tribe there were not more than fifty; the rest remained southward of the Puniu.

All the shrewd Rewi's advice was in vain; the Urewera and West Taupo and Orākau men were resolved on the last fight. So he reluctantly consented to the general wish. Once page 27 he did so, he threw himself into the defence with all his fiery energy and warrior skill.

The Maori redoubt, a small and really insignificant earthwork, was about eighty feet in length by forty feet in width. It was a rectangular entrenchment, with inner and outer trenches, some interior dug-outs and shallow covered ways, and a low parapet, outside of which a post and rail fence around part of the little fort made a further obstacle, but a flimsy one. The diggers were working there as busy as bees under Rewi's direction when a military surveyor at Kihikihi descried through his theodolite telescope the flashing of the spades and shovels in the sunshine, and reported it to the commander of the troops.