Captain George Augustus Preece, one of the last of the gallant little band of New Zealand Cross wearers, was in his day the perfect frontier soldier, one of the native-born who knew the bush as well as any Maori and who made the most successful of leaders of Native Contingents. New Zealand will not see his like again, for the conditions which produced him and his fellow-fighters and scouts, have passed forever. He had an arduous and danger-filled part in the work of making the wild regions fit for peaceful settlement. He was diplomat and peacemaker as well as guerilla soldier, and he served his country well as magistrate. Such men as Porter, the Mair brothers, Northcroft, Gudgeon and Preece live in our history as Colonial leaders who were peculiarly fitted for the exceptional work of bush-fighting, in which methods of warfare had to be modelled on Maori tactics rather than those of the Pakeha army.

Captain G. A. Preece, N.Z.C.

CaptainPreece saw life in many phases in his useful and well-rounded career. He came of a pioneer missionary family, his earliest memories were those of the Urewera Country and the all encompassing bush; he was clerk in a Magistrate's Court in a Pakeha-Maori district when the call for men who could handle Maoris sent him on the soldiering trail, he was a leader of native troops during the most critical era of the Hau-hau campaigns; and after a long period as Resident Magistrate on the East Coast he retired only to begin another period of activity, the business of land agent, which he carried on until his death at Palmerston North. He could have written a great book of the real adventure had he been inclined that way. As it was, he was one of the very few men who served in the thick of the Maori wars who systematically kept a diary. A typed copy of this diary he gave me a few years before his death. It is a most useful source of reference for dates and events. So many incidents that were not recorded in the scant official despatches occurred in the bush warfare of 1869–72 that such a diary as Preece's is exceedingly valuable for fixing the facts of happenings that otherwise would have had to be dredged up from failing memories.

The diary reveals the man's methodical mind, his punctilious attention to details of his military command, the cares and worries of a leader of Maoris; and many an entry reveals the little difficulties which inevitably arose when a superior officer sitting comfortably at headquarters far away failed to understand the urgent problems which confronted the soldier in the field or the bush camp.

Preece the Missionary.

The christian names of Preece are a reminder of the fact that the Great Bishop George Augustus Selwyn was his godfather and namegiver. Preece's father, James Preece, was the first English Missionary to establish a station in the Urewera country. It seemed a thousand miles away from the comfortable mission station at Tauranga when the pioneer Preece and his wife set up their home at Ahike-reru in the ’Forties of last century. It was the heart of savage old New Zealand, the home of the most conservative of all the Maori tribes. The people lived in their entrenched and palisaded villages on the hilltops. Preece persuaded many of them to abandon their forts and settle in the valleys and cultivate the soil. His home was among the Ngati-whare tribe who were linked up with the neighbouring Urewera. You may see the site of the Ahikereru mission station to-day if you go motoring through the Urewera country by the Rotorua-Waikaremoana bush road. It is about a mile from the wayside village of Te Whaiti; a gently rounded round of soft green acacia trees indicates the long-deserted home of “Te Pirihi.”

Early Days, and the First Fighting Trail.

The boy Preece was bi-lingual almost from his birth; he had that perfect knowledge of Maori that belongs only to those who acquired it in childhood.

As a young man, he was given an official position by reason of that knowledge. He was clerk and interpreter to the Magistrate, Mr. Deighton, at Wairoa, Hawke's Bay, which was in those days of the mid-'sixties an important trading place with a large Maori population.

Then in 1865, came the first of the Hauhau fanatic propaganda on the East Coast, and war ruined this peaceful tenor of life along the beautiful Wairoa. Preece was speedily on the war-path, with his rifle, raising contingents of friendly Maoris, riding in desperate haste to rouse the settlements, and presently potting away at the Hauhau raiders. He served in one skirmish and pa-storming after another, from Wairoa to the East Cape, back to Wairoa and the shores page 18 of that then all but unknown Lake Waikaremoana.

An interval of rest and the Court Clerk's duties again; then in 1868, Tc Kooti came on the scene. Preece was one of those who followed him up with a fighting party, and shared in the hard warfare of the winter of 1868. Then after the Poverty Bay massacre he was with a contingent of the Ngati-Kahungunu tribe in the force that drove the warriors out of their trenches at Makaretu, with heavy loss to the rebels.

Ngatapa, and Deeds of Valour.

It was in December, 1869, at the first attack on Te Kooti's stronghold Ngatapa, inland from Poverty Bay, that Captain Preece won his New Zealand Cross, that most rare of military decorations, awarded only for acts of exceptional bravery. Ngatapa was the most formidable and also the most picturesque fortification ever defended by the Maoris against a British force. It was a true mountain fortress, a very strong system of trenches and parapets on the crest of a narrow and precipitous range. The present survey trigonometrical station on the highest part of the pa, is 2288 ft. above sea-level. The place was very difficult of approach; it was compassed about with gorges and cliffs and dense forest. Te Kooti's garrison numbered about three hundred fighting men. The Ngati-Porou and other Maoris serving on the Government side were commanded by Major Ropata, Captain Porter and Captain Preece. Ropata and Preece, leaving their main body in the deep valley below the fortress, climbed the steep cliff with about thirty men. With the greatest gallantry the two officers and their best men gained the end of the trench on the left front of the pa, immediately in rear of the front wall. There was no flanking bastion here and Ropata was able to enfilade the trench for some distance, firing away, with Preece passing loaded rifles on to him. There they remained for some hours, the Hauhaus making desperate efforts to dislodge them. The firing was almost muzzle to muzzle. Part of the outer works was captured by the officers and their few men. One of the Ngati-Porou, Ruka Aratapu, kept up an accurate fire on the Hauhaus from the branches of a tree close to the parapets.

Presently ammunition ran short, and it was necessary to withdraw at dawn next morning, in the absence of support from the column in the valley below. The Ngati-Porou lost five men killed.

On the recommendation of Colonel Whitmore both Ropata and Preece were awarded the New Zealand Cross for their personal bravery and the splendid example they had shown their men.

Ngatapa was not taken that time. It remained for a second attack in strong force, some weeks later, to reduce it, but Te Kooti, with his usual skill and astuteness, escaped into the great forests of the Urewera.

War in the Great Forest.

Those operations were conducted by Colonel Whitmore in regular army style. But later work against the elusive foe was carried on in a very different way, at any rate in the bush

Captain Gilbert Mair, N.Z.C. (This photo was taken in 1920, when Captain Mair, aged 77, was visiting his old fighting scenes.)

expeditions of 1870–72. That was the most arduous and exacting period of the wars. The white troops, consisting chiefly of Armed Constabulary, were detailed to garrison the many frontier redoubts, stockades and blockhouses; and the campaign against Te Kooti and Kereopa and their hard-fighting bands was left to those best fitted for bush work, the Maori contingents. Captain Preece commanded No. 2 Company of Arawa Armed Constabulary, and in conjunction with his gallant comrade Captain Gilbert Mair, (Commanding No. 1 Company) made one expedition after another into the Urewera Coun try. The Ngati-Porou captured Kereopa, but Te Kooti had marvellous luck. Again and again he eluded his pursuers.

In Mair's and Preece's combined force there were only four white men besides themselves. Two were buglers. Preece's trusty Sergeant-major was a good soldier named Bluett, who afterwards attained a captaincy.

He had originally been an officer in the Gold Coast Force; when he came to New Zealand he enlisted in the Armed Constabulary.

The Urewera Highlands.

The scenes in which Preece and his comrades searched for their enemies now and again surprising a camp and fighting a skirmish, were wild and rugged in the extreme—a seemingly endless succession of forested ranges and peaks, like mountainous waves of green, intersected by profound ravines and dark wooded valleys, through which rocky-bedded streams came down in noisy twistings. Range after range rising to cloudy heights, some scarped in wall-sided precipices of grey rock, framed in bush and ferns. In the forest there was a tangle of coiling aka lianas, ropelike vines and supple-jacks, with vast gardens of ferns, especially that soft feathery glory of the bush the todea superba. The jungly bush was beautiful to the eye of a peaceful traveller, but an inferno of impediments to the swag-laden soldier and the explorer. No roads, scarcely a track, the beds of the mountain streams were usually the best highways. This Urewera highland region, extending from the Rangitaiki River to Lake Waikaremoana and beyond was the formidable country in which Te Kooti evaded the Government expeditions for nearly three years, and except for two or three roads and the clearing of some forest valleys it is still in much the same condition in essentials. But the Urewera people have changed; they have schools and there are European-built dwellings, and there are a store or two and a couple of post offices; and the tribesfolk are no longer the bushy-headed warriors and scouts they were in Te Kooti's day.

The Bush War-Parties.

Those bush-fighters were super-men, in their particular field. They endured storm and cold, they were often more than half-starved, they climbed mountains and braved flooded rivers; they held persistently on the war-path for week after week. They set out from their base camps loaded like pack-horses; the only consolation was that the longer they marched the lighter the swags became; when the rations they carried were exhausted they still kept on, climbing, scouting, ever hunting for traces of the Hauhau leader.

Sometimes they rushed a camp, killing a few men, but Te Kooti ever was just one jump ahead of them.

Preece's Base Camp.

In 1870–72, Te Teko, now a little township on the Rotorua-Whakatane main road, was Preece's military headquarters. That was long before there was any road for wheels and even for horses, between those parts and Rotorua. page 19 To reach Tauranga, then the chief settlement of the Bay of Plenty, Preece had to go down the Rangitaiki River by boat and get a horse at Matata. That township was quite a little seaport in the ’seventies. Schooners and cutters entered the mouth of the Awa-a-te-Atua there, and military stores from Auckland were often landed close to where the Horse-Shoe Inu stood in later days. Now Matata's barport has long been closed; the place is a backwater, for new outlets for the Tarawera and Rangitaiki Rivers have been opened miles away. The Rangitaiki River was a great water-transport highway in Preece's day. Large canoes and whaleboats worked up the strong river as far as Te Teko, the first of the chain of military posts established by Whitmore in 1869, as a preliminary to his invasion of the Urewera country. Reckoning the river's windings, it was an inland voyage of about thirty miles.

On the Rangitaiki riverbank at Te Teko—using the site of the Maori entrenchment of 1865, the Hauhau Pa which surrendered to Major William Mair—Captain Preece had his redoubt with its little magazine and its guardhouse and the raupo-thatched huts that formed the barracks of his Arawa Contingent. He and Captain Gilbert Mair each led a company of active young Maoris, and it was these two Arawa companies that did most of the rough bush work in the Urewera campaigns from the western side. Mair's headquarters were at Kaiteriria, on the southern shore of Rotokakahi. The old Maori track between Rotorua and the Urewera country went that way.

A frontier officer, especially an officer commanding native constabulary had a curious variety of duties and responsibilities. Preece and Mair formed roads, built bridges, planted crops, and organised boat and canoe transport service, in addition to the work of feeding their troops, keeping discipline in the Maori camps—always a difficult task—obtaining sufficient rations for expeditions, and painfully extracting from the Government the cash and equipment necessary for the maintenance of the force. The actual marching and fighting were the least of the leaders' troubles; a brush with Te Kooti came as a huge relief and pleasure.

The “Tea-Dinner” Road.

One of Preece's peace-time jobs was the construction of roads towards Whakatane and to Fort Galatea, on the Rangitaiki, the frontier post guarding the way to the Urewera country. Captain Turner, of Tauranga, afterwards a well-known resident of Rotorua, laid out the road lines, and Preece did the rest. At any rate a good deal of it. Just beyond Te Teko, as you motor towards Whakatane, the road crosses a long level, which was evidently once waterlogged swamp country. A stretch of this is known to this day among the Maoris as “Te Tina Roa,” otherwise “Long Tea Dinner” Road. Some of Preece's old soldiers explained to me that one day the Arawa navvies working half-way across the swamp found to their huge annoyance that the cook

Sergeant-Major Bluett, of the Armed Constabulary, formerly an officer in the Gold Coast Force, West Africa.

had forgotten to send their mid-day meal supplies along and they had nothing but a billy of tea to sustain them till they returned to camp. Camp cooks had a way of getting drunk then, as now, and getting their heads punched when the hungry toilers reached home at night.

An Interlude with Royalty.

In December, 1870, H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh visited Rotorua, and the famous Terraces of Rotoma-hana, and Preece received an invitation to go to Rotomahana to meet him. He rode through to Lake Tarawera and went up to the hot lake and found the whole party at dinner. “After dinner we had a lot of songs and finished up with two hours in the bath. Next day: The whole party left in canoes. The Prince is quite a good fellow. He made himself quite at home in the rapaki (waist shawl) and billycock hat and paddled away in the canoe like a brick.”

“Oh for Sniders!”

The soldier's cry is ever for the most modern weapons. In 1870 the best procurable rifle was the Snider which was superseding the long Enfield. Most of the white armed constabulary, who had no fighting after 1869, and who garrisoned the frontier posts, were supplied with Sniders, which had replaced the Terry carbines they had used in their '68-'69 expeditions. But the Maori contingents which carried out the actual campaigning of 1870–72 were still armed with the obsolete Terrys and some of them with the cumbrous long En-fields. Repeatedly Preece applied to the Government for Sniders, but it was not until after the last skirmish with Te Kooti that he got them. That skirmish ended in the Hauhaus getting away scathless, due to the fact that the Government men's Terry ammunition was nearly all spoiled by wet weather.

“Only a few of our guns would fire.” Preece wrote in his diary concerning this skirmish at Mangaone, to the south of Lake Waikaremoana (Feb. 14, 1872). It was the last chance the Government men had of firing at Te Kooti's warriors. “The ammunition was wet or bruised through being carried about so long. I got my cartridge jammed and had to take it out; I could hear curses on each side of me for the same reason. We had a running fight for about two miles across ridges, but with no result. If we had been armed with Sniders we should undoubtedly have had good results, as we had a fair chance at them when climbing up a cliff. Both Mair and I have been trying to impress on the authorities the absolute necessity for having our men armed with Snider rifles or carbines, but to no effect. We have pointed out that the A.C. force, who had done very little field work for nearly two years, are well armed with effective weapons, whereas we who are constantly in the field, marching through the roughest country, without roads of any kind, are armed with obsolete weapons.”

That soldierly malediction held good until the beginning of April of that year, 1872. Then the active little captain recorded with great satisfaction, that the wanted arms had come at last, per coaster to Matata and up the Rangitaiki to Te Teko. It was a glad day at the redoubt when the Sniders, also Armed Constabulary jumpers, were issued to the Maori soldiers.

Diary Entry, April 5th.—“Had firing drill to-day. Sergeant-Major Bluett is a good man; he is thoroughly up in his drill. I wish I knew half as much. I must try and go through a regular course when I get back from the expedition.”

So it was then, as in more recent wars; the soldier was often so busy doing the actual fighting that he had no time to learn the textbook drill.