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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 10 (February 1, 1934)

Famous New Zealanders — No. 11 — Colonel J. M. Roberts, N.Z.C — The Story of the Forest Rangers

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Famous New Zealanders
No. 11
Colonel J. M. Roberts, N.Z.C
The Story of the Forest Rangers.

The late Colonel J. M. Roberts, N.Z.C.

The late Colonel J. M. Roberts, N.Z.C.

The New Zealand forces, organised for the Maori Wars after the regular British regiments had been withdrawn from the operations, contained perfect frontier soldiers who outfought the Maori in his native wilds and brought lasting peace to the borderlands. The senior surviving officer of that hard-fighting corps, the New Zealand Armed Constabulary Field Force, was the late Colonel J. M. Roberts, N.Z.C., the subject of this biographical sketch. He began his military career in the celebrated Forest Rangers, with Von Tempsky, hero of many a deed of daring in our country's adventurous age.

The stories of courage and endurance in New Zealand's dangerous days can never be told too often. They are a perpetual incentive to a spirit of duty, bravery and self-sacrifice. Maori and Pakeha rightly share in the admiration felt for such deeds of valour. They were the heroes of combat in the days when war was still a chivalrous affair, fought at close quarters, and when the human factor had not yet been submerged by the diabolical contrivances of scientific wholesale slaughter.

John Mackintosh Roberts, who began his soldiering life by carrying carbine and bowie-knife in No. 2 Company of Forest Rangers in the early part of the Waikato War, and who lived through innumerable bush-fighting perils to become Colonel commanding the Armed Constabulary, was probably the most admirable figure of all in the list of colonial soldiers who won the New Zealand Cross for deeds of exceptional valour. He was particularly distinguished for his cool courage and resourcefulness in emergency. More than once he extricated his men from seemingly hopeless positions by his excellent bush-craft and his confidence-inspiring leadership. His military career extended over about a quarter of a century, and he was for more than ten years a Magistrate, with his headquarters at Tauranga. Many of his comrades in the war years were men who had learned their trade in British regiments, and who adapted themselves to the conditions of bush-fighting here. Roberts learned his bushmanship and his military craft in his youth in the New Zealand forest. In the earlier Maori wars the British commanders dreaded the bush, and cut away the timber in order to get at the enemy. That was not the way of the colonial soldier who knew his business. “We learned very early,” said Roberts to the present writer, “to look on a tree as a friend. If it could shelter a Maori it could also shelter us.” So in the later campaigns pakeha fought Maori quite in the Maori manner, skirmishing from tree to tree, adopting ambush and surprise tactics, and taking to the Maori bush costume and wearing shawl or blanket kilt-fashion, like the native rapaki, instead of trousers.

On the Gold-Diggings.

Roberts came of Scottish Highland ancestry an Inverness family. He was born in India and came to Auckland as a boy of fifteen, in 1855.

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The first eight years of his life in the colony were spent in bush and farming life, on the edge of the great Hunua forest, which extended south and east from Papakura for many a league. He and his widowed mother lived in the homestead of his uncle, Major Clare, and he did his share in all the work of a pioneer settler. In 1861 he and a mate from the Wairoa were attracted by the reports of the wonderful gold-finds in Otago, and they sailed off with a party of other young adventurers, in a small schooner from Auckland. She was a rough little craft, that schooner, Roberts narrated, with a rough crowd of passengers. Fights were frequent, and at last the skipper told the quarrelsome hard-cases that they would have to settle their arguments on shore. He put into an East Coast bay and anchored, and sent a boat on shore with the pugilists, to punch each other on the beach. This suited all hands; the various fist affairs were disposed of happily on firm land, and the voyage was resumed. Dunedin was reached at last, by good luck, and the two partners carried their swags into the Promised Land of gold. No luck there; they dug and panned out at Gabriel's Gully and other fields, but obtained very little reward for all their pains and travels. Back to Auckland they sailed presently, with very little in their pockets but an excellent stock of experience. “Well,” said the veteran, when he told the story nearly sixty years afterwards, “if we didn't make our pile on the diggings, we certainly learned self-reliance.”

In the Forest Rangers.

That experience was all to the good a little later on, when the Waikato War began, and the settlers on the Papakura and Hunua forest-edge had to stand to the defence of their homesteads. One of the first skirmishes began near the Clare homestead, where some bush-workers were fired on, and it developed into a fight that extended into the Kirikiri bush, near the present Papakura-Wairoa road.

Very soon it became necessary to form a bush-roving corps which would scout the forests on the flanks of General Cameron's Army, and deal with the Maori war-parties which now and again laid ambuscades on the Great South Road and attacked convoys on the Drury-Pokeno section, where the road was cut through dense bush. Captain William Jackson, a young settler who was one of Roberts’ neighbours, raised a company of Forest Rangers for this adventurous duty, and presently a second company was formed, under Captain Gustavus F. Von Tempsky, that daring and skilful guerilla soldier who was to figure so brilliantly and at last tragically in our fighting story. Roberts was the second man to enlist in Von Tempsky's Company, and so began a comradeship which lasted till that fatal day in the Taranaki forest five years later, when Von Tempsky fell to a Hauhau bullet.

Men of the Bowie Knife.

The Rangers became for all the purposes of bush-scouting and skirmishing a perfect little corps. They were armed with the best weapons procurable in those times, a Terry breechloading carbine and a revolver, to which Von Tempsky's Company added a bowie-knife, after the pattern of the famous American knife; Von Tempsky had learned its usefulness in California and Mexico.

“Von Tempsky taught us a regular drill with the bowie-knife (he had them made by a blacksmith in Auckland from his pattern),” said Roberts. “As it happened, we did not make much use of it in actual fighting in the Waikato, but it was very handy in bush work, and at Orakau we scooped out shallow shelter trenches with it, when we lay under fire before the pa.”

Countless bush adventures and much hard marching fell to the Rangers. Roberts soon became Sergeant-Major of No. 2 Company, and then Lieutenant; his fellow-subaltern under Von Tempsky was Westrupp, afterwards Major in an East Coast Corps. The tide of war passed on southward, Cameron's invading army pressed the Maori back and back, and presently Roberts and his comrades were scouting in advance of the Imperial forces round about Te Awamutu, the army field base in 1864.

The Rangers at Orakau.

On the march to Orakau, which resulted in the famous siege and the noble defiance by the Maoris of overwhelming odds, Lieutenant Roberts led the advance with a half-company of his Rangers. He led, too his Rangers in one of the unsuccessful attempts to storm the Maori earthworks on the first day. “All we saw,” he said, describing to me his share of the operations, “was the peach groves and the newlymade parapets. We couldn't see a Maori at first. They had made long horizontal loopholes or embrasures in the parapet, with pieces of timber on the top and at the sides to keep them open, and through these openings they delivered a heavy fire on us. The first thing we knew was a regular line of smoke and flash running the whole length of the earthworks on the west flank as they gave us a volley. After that and a second volley, the black heads popped up now and again, and we drew off, and with Jackson and Von Tempsky's Rangers, making a hundred carbine-and-revolver men altogether, we formed the eastern side of the cordon surrounding the pa.”

“Deerfoot” Roberts.

The Forest Rangers led the pursuit of the retreating Maoris when the pa was evacuated by the despairing garrison. The fast runners in Jackson's and Von Tempsky's companies outdistanced even the mounted men, who were delayed by the rough ground. Lieutenant Roberts was mentioned by Von Tempsky in the MS. diary in which he recorded the events of the page 27 Rangers’ Waikato service. “There was Roberts ahead of us all,” he wrote, “with Thorpe, of Jackson's company, and two or three others, the fleetest of the corps. That day I christened Roberts ‘Deerfoot,’ as I panted behind him, bellowing my lungs out in shouting to the men and directing the pursuit.”

A Maori Hero.

Colonel Roberts, describing more than fifty years afterwards that chase of the defeated survivors of Orakau, said that he and some of his comrades crossed the Puniu River and went on for a considerable distance south of it until coming darkness stopped the pursuit. One incident always remained a poignant memory. “There was one Maori, after we crossed the river, who kept us off for a long time by turning and kneeling down every now and again and presenting his gun at us. We fired, but did not hit him at first. He did not return our fire. He was gaining time to enable some of his older people to get away. At last I and another man shot him, and I shall never forget how sorry we were when we went up and found that his gun was empty. He had been presenting an unloaded gun at us all the time. We were terribly grieved to think we had killed so brave a man. Of course we would have spared him had we known he hadn't a shot left.”

The Death of Von Tempsky.

Four years later, after a return for a time to farming work at the Hunua, we find Roberts holding a commission as Sub-Inspector in the newly-organised Armed Constabulary Field Force, of which Mr. Commissioner St. John Brannigan was the head (though he did not take the field himself). Sub-Inspector was equivalent to Captain, and it was by the military title rather than the official police term that the blueuniformed soldiers preferred to be called. Roberts was with his old comrade Von Tempsky, now Major, in Lieut.-Colonel McDonnell's force which made the attack on the Hauhau bush stockade at Te Ngutu-o-te-manu, on the South Taranaki plain, in 1868. Many accounts have been given of that disastrous affair, and scarcely any two stories agree, and naturally so, for in the confusion of skirmishing in the tangled bush, amidst smoke and din and the striking down of men by bullets from unseen foes, every man sees a battle from his own point of view and has a very circumscribed area of observation.

It was here that Von Tempsky was killed. When Roberts last saw him he was cutting away rather listlessly with his sword at a hanging tree-vine, and expressing his disgust at the mismanagement of the attack. He and Roberts waited in vain for the order to rush the Hauhau stockade, which could have been taken. It was after Roberts moved away to get a view of the position that the fatal bullet found a target in his friend.

Major Von Tempsky.

Major Von Tempsky.

The Retreat Through the Forest.

Of the many narratives of Te Ngutu that I have heard, by far the most authoritative and connected is Colonel Roberts’ own account, which I heard from his lips at Rotorua in 1919. Roberts had always been rather modest and reticent about his own share in the events of that day and night in the bush, and this narrative was the first full account given by him. It was his gallant work on that occasion, fighting a rearguard action and collecting the survivors, that chiefly won for him his New Zealand Cross, presented on parade in the Waikato long after the war.

“I had fired a few shots at the palisade,” said Colonel Roberts, “more for the sake of making a noise than anything else, for I could not see a single Maori. Our men were hotly pressed by the Hauhau fire from good cover. We were by this time on the east side of the pa, firing away, and waiting vainly for orders. I heard Lieut. Hunter—who had been the life of the camp at Waihi—calling out to his men: ‘Give it to them, boys; give it to them! I can see the white of his eyes! Give it to him!’ and similar cries. I saw him a little time afterwards, poor fellow, lying on the broad of his back, dead, staring at the tree-tops. There were a few men with me; an officer cannot see more than ten or fifteen when he is bush-skirmishing under such conditions. I asked whether anyone had seen Major McDonnell. I then came to the conclusion that he was fighting his way out. He had not left us any orders. In this situation, I did page 28 a thing which, strictly speaking, was a great piece of presumption on the part of a junior officer. I ordered the bugler (H. Sibley) to sound the ‘Halt!’ and the ‘Officers’ Call.’ I collected all the men I could, and two or three officers appeared. Captain Buck was one of them. I asked them whether they knew where the Major was, and they said they heard he was killed. We had a consultation, and I told them that from the sound of the firing I believed McDonnell was making his way back to Waihi. Then I asked: ‘Which of us is the senior?’ and on comparing dates of commissions with Buck I found I was the senior officer.

“I said to Buck, ‘You stay here, and I'll go and see what has become of Von Tempsky. If I'm not back in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, you'll know what to do.’ I left him with some men, and scouted back by myself through the bush towards the other side of the pa, passing some of my men who were still sticking to it, taking cover behind the trees and firing whenever they saw a head or other sign of the enemy. One or two of them called to me ‘Go back, sir, you'll be shot.’ They said they believed the Major was shot. I worked along the flank for two or three chains, towards the creek that ran in the rear of the pa. I saw nothing of Von Tempsky, but he must have been lying close by. It was all dense bush there, with some very large mahoe trees, the biggest I had ever seen, and some rata.

“At last I turned to come back, and just as I did so a bullet buried itself in a sapling behind me. When. I made my way back to where I had left Captain Buck a quarter of an hour previously, I found him lying on his back, dead. I got together all the men I could find and disposed them as well as I could to resist the Hauhaus, who were pressing us hard, yelling ‘Surround them, surround them!’ in Maori. I formed the men into a rough half-moon front, and instructed them to fire volleys: ‘Blaze away as hard as you can, boys, blaze away!’ We fired a number of volleys, and this had some effect on the Hauhaus, who kept a greater distance after that.

“By this time it was getting quite dusk in the bush, under the close, dense tree-tops. I came to the conclusion that I had better try and make my way out to camp with the wounded. I had heard firing away on my right, and knew it must be McDonnell fighting his way out to Waihi. There were eleven wounded, but most of these could walk. My total strength now was fifty-eight men. Sergeant Russell fell, shot through the hip; he was a fine brave fellow. We had to leave him there, lying propped up against a tree, with a loaded revolver in his hand: he was too badly wounded to use his carbine. We had some faint hopes of rescuing him later, but the Hauhaus got him, after he had stood them off at first with his revolver. Lieut. Hirtzel was with us, and another good man was big James Livingston, of Waipapa, Hawera, who had come with the force as a voluntcer; he was a splendid fellow, cool and brave, and a first-rate bushman. When we were under a very heavy fire he was picking up the rifles of men who had been killed or wounded and smashing them against the butts of trees, saying that the Hauhaus would never be able to use those guns. He broke Russell's carbine before we left him.

A Terrible Night in the Bush.

“I kept my men together as well as I could in the bush, and got my wounded along; we went very slowly, occasionally turning to fire. I don't think we were travelling more than half-a-mile in the hour. All of us were now very exhausted, and I ordered the men to sit down in the bush undergrowth, for a rest, waiting till the moon rose, so that I could fix my course. We had two or three friendly Maoris with us, Kupapas (Government men) from Wanganui. I kept them close by me, for I was depending on them to lead us out of the bush. In fact I put a sentry over them to make sure they did not give us the slip.

“We were still within cooey of the pa,” Colonel Roberts continued; “in fact, we could hear the Hauhaus’ yells and war-songs all night, we were so close. About two o'clock in the morning the moon rose over the tree tops, and now that I had an idea of the points of the compass I made a start again. I sent the Maoris ahead, telling my man, who was keeping an eye on them, to make sure that they were not attempting to leave the column. ‘If they do,’ I said, ‘you know what to do.'

“When we started on our retreat we were well in on the Egmont or inland side of McDonnell's route. By about daylight we got out on to the track leading down to the Waingongoro River ford, the track we had come in the morning, and we reached our base camp, the Waihi Redoubt, about eight o'clock. McDonnell and the main body had arrived there the night before. Some of them had given us up for lost. My friend Captain Brown (afterwards killed at Ngatapa) was one of those who hurried down to meet us. As he shook hands with me, he said: ‘Some of them said you were all killed, Roberts, but I knew you'd turn up, because you know the bush.'”

All the dead and some of the wounded were left on the battlefield. The death-roll numbered twenty-four, of whom five were officers. Twenty-six wounded were brought off the field. One man, Private Dore, of the Wellington Rangers, who was shot through an arm, in Roberts’ retreat, was lost in the bush, and did not reach Waihi until four days afterwards. Of the officers, Major Von Tempsky, Captain Buck, Captain Palmer, Lieut. Hunter and Lieut. Hastings were killed. Palmer and Hastings were with Roberts’ force, and were mortally wounded. Palmer died as he was being carried through the bush, and was left there.

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Another Rearguard Action.

That gallant bit of duty was one of the deeds for which Roberts was awarded the New Zealand Cross, the rarest of all military decorations in the British Empire. The other service was his work in command of No. 6 Company of Armed Constabulary at the fight at Moturoa, in rear of the present town of Waverley, in South Taranaki. Roberts had raised that Company (or division as they called an A.C. company of 100 men) in Auckland and on the Thames goldfields, mostly young men whom he quickly drilled into a competent body. They were popularly called “The Young Brigade,” and well they fought in their first bush battle, that engagement at Moturoa. It was an unfortunate affair for the Government forces; a defeat and retreat, redeemed only by the brave rearguard action in which Roberts and his No. 6 took their full share. Colonel Whitmore–Moturoa was one of his very few failures–gave Roberts high praise in his despatches for his cool and efficient handling of his company.

The Last Years of Service.

Two more years of fighting were ahead of Roberts after those two tragic Taranaki battles of 1868. He was Major in command of the right wing of Whitmore's force which invaded the Urewera Country in 1869; he served in every important expedition on the East Coast and the West until the close of the war. He commanded that most remote of frontier posts, Opepe Stockade, near Taupo, in the early Seventies; he made roads, and pioneered the
Our Frontier Soldiers fifty years ago. Officers of the N.Z. Armed Constabulary Field Force, at Parihaka, Taranaki, November, 1881. Major Roberts, Commanding Officer.

Our Frontier Soldiers fifty years ago. Officers of the N.Z. Armed Constabulary Field Force, at Parihaka, Taranaki, November, 1881. Major Roberts, Commanding Officer.

wild places of the frontier. In 1879–81 he commanded the A.C. Field Force and the Volunteers in the Taranaki operations and in the occupation of Parihaka. Our photograph of the Constabulary officers in that expedition shows a splendid set of frontier soldiers, probably the most competent in the work of bush-fighting that any country has ever produced. They are all gone now; Roberts was the last, when he died at Rotorua in 1928. As soldier and as Magistrate he was conspicuous for ability, fairness, and fearlessness. A good and useful pioneer New Zealander, who set an example of fine courage and fidelity to the highest ideals of duty.

Aluminium Locomotives.

According to the Natural Resources Department of the Canadian National Railways, railway experts in Canada and in the United States are turning their attention to the possibility oi using aluminium alloys instead of steel in the building of locomotives and railway coaches. Experimental work would seem to indicate the feasibility of a reduction in the weight of engines and coaches sufficient to permit train speeds higher than those at which motor vehicles can safely be operated, thus presenting a new basis on which railways might meet road competition. It is considered that the building of an “alloy” locomotive capable of hauling passenger trains at a speed of 100 miles an hour for average long distances is a practical proposition.

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