A Running Fight.

All that day the battle raged along the sands towards Matata. Altogether there must have been a thousand Maoris engaged in that vigorous argument as to the right of way. There were a few pakehas with the Arawa force, men of the Colonial Defence Force and Forest Rangers, under young Captain Tom McDonnell, but the issue was fought out chiefly by the Maori warriors. The Arawa chiefs were Te Pokiha Taranui (well known in after years as Major Fox, of Maketu), the veteran Tohi te Ururangi, and a dozen others, representing all sections of the tribe from Maketu to Tarawera. The firearms used were mostly old Tower flint-lock muskets and double and singlebarrel shot-guns. Nearly every man, too, had a tomahawk in his belt, and many used weapons of stone, the handy mere, for despatching the foe; and there were taiaha users too, active fellows skilled in the art of fence and attack with a most shapely and well-balanced weapon. There was not a rifle in the whole bare-legged army. The crashing bangs of heavily-loaded guns and muskets in independent firing, sometimes in thunderous volleys, sounded all day along the sands, and page 22 to any spectator on the cliffs the moving clouds of smoke marked the passage of the running fight eastward towards the Awa-a-te-Atua mouth.

The enemy from the East Coast made desperate efforts to stay the pursuit. They had left half their flotilla of war canoes in the river at Matata, and if these wakas were seized they would be cut off and cut up.

They were between the Arawa and the deep sea. Two days before this they had had a taste of British naval artillery. Two warships, H.M.S. “Falcon” and the colonial gunboat “Sandfly,” had shelled them as they ran along the beach, and a heavy shell from the “Falcon,” steaming close in to the coast, had killed several men of the Whakatohea tribe (from Opotiki) in a group at the mouth of the Waeheke stream, near Pukehina.