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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 10, Issue 9 (December 2, 1935)

The Ancient Warrior of Hauturu

The Ancient Warrior of Hauturu.

The narrative of Hongi's accumulation of English gifts, most of which he exchanged at Sydney for muskets and gunpowder and lead, is a familiar story; so too is the record of his many great expeditions in the early Twenties of last century in pursuance of his methodical programme of wiping out one enemy after another. In the North country long ago I saw some of the last of his warriors, tottering relics with deeply moko-chiselled and pigmented faces, who spoke of events that seemed very ancient history indeed. A still vigorous specimen of the cannibal canoe-men was a quite wonderful old fellow I met on Hauturu, the Little Barrier Island, just forty years ago; the Government had purchased the island for a native bird sanctuary—a compulsory purchase, in which poor old Paratene te Manu had very little share except to make his X on the dotted line. Hongi's white-haired veteran—he was of the Ngati-Wai section of Ngapuhi—was about to be evicted with others of his hapu who disputed the Government purchase, and he raised a lament for the island of his birth.

A present of tobacco gained his confidence for a talk; and he gave me a seriatim account of his musket-and-tomahawk adventures. He ticked them off on his fingers, eight expeditions in all, first under the great Hongi himself, then under his lieutenant, Te Wera. It was curious indeed, to talk with a man who had helped to invade and conquer the Tamaki towns on the present site of Auckland City, and eat the inhabitants, more than seventy years before. I asked him his age in years; he replied “Kotahi rau” (“One hundred”), like many another ancient of the race. My computation, from the known dates of various expeditions in which he served, was ninety at least.

Leaving that memory of the tattooed old soldier of the kai-tangata conqueror slowly hoeing his potato-patch under the trees where the bellbirds chimed and the tui fluted—a memory I rather like to linger on—I return to Hongi for a moment. This thought occurs: What attitude would Hongi have taken had he survived until the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi? I am strongly disposed to believe that, in spite of all the one-time close association of Hongi with the pakeha race, he would have opposed the signing of the Treaty, * page 20 page 21 because he would have foreseen more clearly than most of his fellow-Maoris the consequences of accepting the eminent domain of the white Queen. He dreaded British forms of authority, especially the military authority. Yet he might have come to realise that it was better to accept a friendly British authority than an arbitrary seizure by the French.