The sun was just coming up over the foggy ranges, one morning in November, 1862, when Lieutenant Henry Bates, of Her Majesty's 65th. Regiment, left his raupo-thatched hut at the Queen's Redoubt, on the Pokeno Flat, and embarked in his redpine-tree canoe for a lone-hand mission to the Waikato river villages. The waka was the simplest kind of dug-out, about twenty-four feet long and two feet in beam, chopped out from a rimu log. He carefully stowed in the bottom of the canoe his double-barrel muzzle-loading shotgun—a much valued Joe Manton—and ammunition, his blankets, and some packets of food in a flax basket. The young officer's costume was as primitive as his river-boat—a cabbage-tree hat, a Crimean shirt, and a kilt mat of woven flax belted round his waist. “A very convenient dress for canoe work,” he wrote in his diary about that time, “where one had often to jump overboard to shove the waka off shoals, and where one ran frequent risk of being capsized and having to swim for it. And quite enough, too, for a summer day's work in the lovely New Zealand climate.”

The creek which flowed below the small plain on which the Queen's Redoubt stood (the place is near the present Pokeno railway station) was just large enough to take the canoe down into the Mangatawhiri River. Entering this winding, sluggish stream through the flax swamps, Bates paddled down to Te Ia, where it discharged into the broad Waikato. Now a long day's work was before him, and problems of frontier diplomacy exercised his mind as he plied a vigorous paddle up stream. Toilsome, but delightful. The young officer's spirits bounded; this was the joy of life, a sufficiently dangerous job of secret service work, in the glorious summer weather and the freedom of the river road.

Lieutenant Bates, though still in his twenties, was a soldier of wide experience; he had served in the Taranaki War of 1860–61; he knew the bush and the rivers, and rough travel ways, and he knew the Maoris. He was one of the few British officers who had become a proficient speaker of the Maori tongue and qualified as an interpreter. He was a staff interpreter for General Cameron. Besides acquiring a knowledge of the native tongue he had acquired also a wife of beauty and high degree. She was a daughter of Manihera Matangi, one of the Atiawa chiefs, from Taranaki, who sold the site of Wellington City to the New Zealand Company in 1839. “Te Peeti” (pronounced Pay-tee), “The Bates,” as the Maoris called him, was not only a good soldier and skilled linguist. He was an artist in watercolour, and he could write something better than official memos. Some of his manuscript diary notes of military life were given to me by his half-caste son (the late “Rewi” Bates, an old friend of mine). From these notes I reconstruct this narrative of a special service expedition on the Waikato River in the critical days just before the war.

The young lieutenant of the “Royal Tigers” was ostensibly bound on a duck-shooting trip up the river, to the creeks and great lagoons about Rangiriri. His real object was to obtain information for the General on tracks and waterways of communication, river landing places, likely sites for fortifications, Maori supplies of arms and ammunition, and other notes which would be useful in the event of the troops invading the Waikato. The situation was tense; pakehas were not welcomed in the Waikato, and those

(From a sketch by Lieut. H. S. Bates, 65th Regiment.)
Old Ngaruawahia: the Maori King's headquarters in 1862, before the Waikato War.

known to be connected with the Government were specially undesirable to the Kingites. On a previous spying-out expedition Bates had to lie concealed under shawls and blankets in the bottom of a friendly Maori's canoe when two large war-canoes, with fifty or sixty men in each, hove in sight coming down the river. There were some places where he was very welcome a few months back; now he was under suspicion as a spy. The shrewd Maori leaders knew that the Government intended to invade the Waikato sooner or later; it only awaited a pretext for setting in motion the troops encamped along the Great South Road. To obtain any information the intelligence officer had to go to work in the most cautious and circumspect manner.