1780—Gift of Land at Panmure, Called Tauoma.

About 1780, an event fruitful in disturbances took place. Te Tahuri, the daughter of Te Horeta, who by descent was half Ngaoho and half Waikato, had a younger female relation (called by Heteraka a teina) who married Te Putu, a Ngatipaoa man. For some reason which does not appear, he wished to live away from the residences of his friends at Wharekawa, on the Firth of the Thames; and Kehu asked her relative Te Tahuri to mark off for her a piece of land on the Tamaki river. Te Tahuri denned a large track, probably then unoccupied, commencing near the place now called Panmure, and extending round the shores to Whakamuhu, and thence inland to Waiatarua (College) Lake; and Te Putu and his wife and friends appear to have taken immediate possession. This place was celebrated for its great growth of tupakihi, the plant which produced the poisonous fruit called "tutu." The sages of Waikato, when they heard of the arrangement, predicted future quarrels and misfortunes as likely to result from the intrusion of a strange people into the hitherto compact territory, peopled alone by the cognate tribes. "Soon these two old women will be drunk with the juice of the "tutu" was the prophecy—not proverb, as Mr. Gillies understood it. It must here be noticed that the Court is of opinion that this estate was marked off for Kehu and her husband in the manner described, and that it was not the ancestral territory of Ngatipaoa. Haora Tipa and the witnesses on that side speak of Kehu as a Waikato woman, and of the land as belonging to her, though they deny the gift, and speak of it as originally Ngatipaoa land. This is clearly inconsistent. It was not alleged that Ngatipaoa had any land on the other side of the Tamaki; and I am aware that the title of the land on the East shores of the Wairoa, with the exception of a small piece of 100 acres or so at Oue, was, after a strong contest, decided in this Court not to belong to them, and they do not attempt to give any explanation of how they became possessed of this isolated piece at Panmure—called Tauoma. Indeed, when they state that Kehu was a Waikato woman and that the land was hers, it appears to me that practically they abandon their position of Tauoma being ancestral Ngatipaoa land.