For the present, Hongi. The great war-chieftain of the north, whose name spread such terror in the cannibal raids, and whose muskets made his armies invincible, has been denounced as a horrible cannibal who ever thirsted for blood and whose reign of terror spread devastation and slaughter everywhere. Those who have written and spoken about Hongi—and in this amazing age of talk-by-machinery much is talked of the country's early history—have laid undue emphasis on the savagery of the man. That cannibalism, that slave-making, however, were but the ancient customary accompaniments of Maori-Polynesian warfare. There were cannibals by choice and craving, as in other primitive races; but the kai-tangata habit in New Zealand was in the main a ceremonial practice, reserved for the war-path and the aftermath, the warriors’ “bringing home the sheaves.”

At close quarters, the heroic missionaries, newly-come from England, were horrified by such deeds of slaughter and cannibalism as they witnessed at the Bay of Islands and their other stations. Had they lived to these days they might have admitted that there are many worse things in our supercivilised world than ever there were in wild Maori Land. The Maori did not torture his prisoners, except in rare cases; he did not condemn his enemy to a living death in prison.

Revenge was Hongi's ruling passion in the last decade of his life, and in fulfilment of that passion he was capable of extraordinary enterprise in attaining his desire. Yet in that he differed in no way, primitive man as he was, from some great European rulers of to-day. They plan and carry out vengeance and invasions on a vastly more dreadful scale than the petty wars of cannibal chieftains. By comparison with a Napoleon or a Mussolini, Hongi was as a “cockabully” to a shark, writing in a military sense, of course. Nevertheless, he was a ruthless Attila to the tribes who were less well armed than his Ngapuhi musketeers.

The story of Hongi's voyage to England and his return with munitions of war (most of which he acquired in Sydney, or Port Jackson as it was then called) reveals him as a truly great man. His was the long vision; he had the brains, the indomitable resolution and the enterprise to plan a great armament programme in order to make his people invincible and execute his accumulated utu schemes. He seized joyfully the opportunity of accompanying the Rev. Thomas Kendall to England under the mana of the Church Mission Society. Hongi had been from the first a friend of the white traders and ship captains and missionaries; he saw shrewdly that he had everything to gain by peaceful association with the pakeha. He saved the Bay of Islands mission establishments from molestation. Some of the mission people bemoaned his obdurate paganism, and his cannibal expeditions; they were apt to forget that but for protection by himself and his chiefs the Christian propagandists would have encountered severe critics, their chief argument the tomahawk. And the Church proved extremely useful to him.

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In England, with his near relative, the chief Waikato, he learned English manners, wore English clothes, assumed a surface piety—this greatly pleased the mission folk. He had entry to the homes of the great; he met Royalty, he was an honoured guest everywhere as King of New Zealand. Mr. Kendall was an excellent press agent and business manager; but the good man (he fell from grace later on in New Zealand) did not altogether realise then how shrewdly Hongi Hika was making use of him and his Society.