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.

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.

“King Hongi” meets King George IV.

The pair of tattooed New Zealand-ers, wearing for the occasion their finest native garments, were presented to King George IV, with whom they shook hands.

“How do you do, Mr. King George?” said Hongi, as he bowed to the King.

The British Attack on Hone Heke's stockade, Puketutu Pa, Lake Omapere, May 8, 1845. This was the first inland battle of a British military force in New Zealand.
(From a watercolour drawing by Sergeant J. Williams, 58th Regiment).

“How do you do, Mr. King Hongi?” was the good-natured monarch's reply.

The King gave the chiefs courtesy titles. Waikato was styled “Prince Waikato.” Hongi and he were each given, among other presents, gold-mounted double-barrel flintlock guns on which their names were engraved. These weapons, the best makes procurable at that time, were particularly acceptable to King Hongi and Prince Waikato. They soon came in useful in battle.

The interview with Royalty did not tend to promote humility in the two chiefs. It is related in the just-published reminiscences of the celebrated Danish trader Hans Tapsell, of Maketu^* that Waikato and his brother Wharepoaka made much of the honour they achieved. Their sister was Tapsell's second wife. Waikato would say to Tapsell, “Who are you? I have shaken hands with the King and you would not be allowed even to see him.”

A picture of the two chiefs, with their missionary friend, Mr. Kendall, was painted while they were in England. This painting became the property of the Church Mission Society. It was presented to the New Zealand Government about twenty years ago, and it has been in the care of the Tourist Department ever since. When the new National Museum and Art Gallery in Wellington is ready, the historic picture will be hung there. The late Major-General Gordon Robley, from whose pencil and pen came many valuable sketches of Maori life, and especially of moko or tattooing, in 1864-65, made a black-and-white drawing of Hongi, from this painting, and he sent me the drawing, here reproduced.

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.

Hone Heke, the Chivalrous Rebel.

Hone Heke, of Kaikohe and the Bay of Islands, had been reared in the cannibal warfare school, before he became for a time a “mission boy,” amiably rounding off in the establishment of the Rev. Henry Williams at Paihia the varied and turbulent experience gained on the warpath and in the war-canoe flotillas and among the rough whaleship crews in Kororareka bay. His portrait is in some degree an index to his character. The picture of him illustrating this article is from a pencil drawing which I possess, excellently sharp after nearly eighty years. It was drawn at the Bay of Islands by J. Gilfillan, of Wanganui—the Gilfillan of the tragic Mataraua affair in 1847. The date is uncertain, but it was probably 1846. His nose though not the predatory ihu-kaka (“parrot-beak”) the strong hook-nose that distinguished some great Maori leaders, was prominent and well-shaped; the prominent jaws and chin denoted firmness and resolution. He was tattooed but not with the full design of moko, such as that engraved deeply on the face of his great kinsman and antagonist, Tamati Waka Nene. His character was a blend of ambition, strong patriotism that became a fervid passion, a considerable degree of vanity and bravado, and a shrewdness quickened by his partial civilisation. Like his uncle, Hongi (who was also the father of his wife, Hariata) he had high regard for the missionaries; and commercial considerations actuated his friendly feeling for the traders and the ship captains. But, like Hongi again, he dreaded the military power of the pakeha, of which he had heard much and which he was to encounter in a few years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. His vision was keen; he was not long in realising that the immigration of the strong English race would in time submerge the Maori.

Economic Considerations.

He signed the Treaty, but his dissatisfaction when British authority became effective soon after 1840 is not to be wondered at. It struck at his pocket—or his substitute for a pocket—for it deprived him of most of his accustomed revenue from the visiting ships. Before the British flag was hoisted he and his cousin, Titore (whose pa was on a hill just in rear of the present town of Russell) divided a levy of £5 on each ship, a kind of Maori port fee. They collected their dues from the whaleships and other vessels outside the anchorage, boarding them in their canoes before Tapeka Point was rounded. Then there was Pomare, whose pa was on Otuihu, that beautiful place where great pohutukawa trees adorn the cliffs and shore, in the inner waters between Kororareka and Opua. Pomare collected the toll from ships using Wahapu Bay and the inner waters. The Customs duties, and the introduction of British maritime control, spoiled all that trade for the chiefs; it moreover made every pakeha commodity, especially tobacco, more expensive.

Hone Heke. (From a drawing by J. A. Gilfillan, at the Bay of Islands). (Protected by Copyright.)

Ruhe's Pathetic Chant.

A variety of real and imaginary grievances, gradually simmering and at last boiling over, set Heke on the warpath and made the British flag on the Maiki signal-mast the special object of his hate. The story of all this is well-known; but what is not widely known is the fact that the chanting of a song was the culminating incident that set Hone Heke mustering his followers for battle. Maketu, the first Maori hanged by process of law in New Zealand was the son of the old chief Ruhe. The father acknowledged the justice of the death sentence (for the murder of the Robertson family on Motu - arohia Island), but the ignominious manner of death shocked the people, and the old man grieved over it continually. At last, in 1844, he went to Hone Heke at Kaikohe and chanted to him a lament for his son, beginning with these words:

“Kaore te aroha mohukihuki ana, Te panga mai ki ahau, me he ahi e tahu.”

(“Alas, this all-devouring grief, That burns within me like a flame.”)

This was an adaptation of an ancient poem in which a great warrior was called upon to avenge the death of a kinsman. Ruhe's chant aroused the intense sympathy of Heke and his Ngati-Hine and many other clans of Ngapuhi; it was probably the clinching element in the general feeling of rebellion against British authority, symbolised by the flag and the mast on which it flew on Maiki Hill.

A Gentleman's War.

Heke's war was waged in a knightly fashion strange to remember in these unchivalrous days. When the troops marched inland against him in 1845, he regarded them in a semi-friendly way, not at all the manner of a professional soldier. He laid no ambuscades; he cut no communications; he waylaid no supply convoys. Some of his young men even took pity on the soldiers and gave them assistance in the bush. He did not interfere with non-combatants; in fact, he made the war something like a chivalrous tournament. The heavily-equipped soldiers were helpless in the bush; they could all have been cut off and destroyed had the Maoris been so inclined. There was no fighting at night. Civilised nations have changed all that!

Heke is the popular hero of the North even to-day. He was the hero of most of the Maori tribes when the news of the war went forth. Mention of Heke brings tears of affection to many Ngapuhi eyes to-day. And so with his lamented grand-nephew, the late Hone Heke, for many years M.P. for the Northern Maori district. He was adored by his people of Kaikohe and other centres of the old tradition.

The Wisdom of Nene.

Writers and orators have praised Tamati Waka Nene as the benevolent friend of the British and the chief agent in persuading the Maoris to assent to the Treaty by which these islands became a British land. Naval and military officers found him a sage warrior who, out of the wealth of his campaigning experiences could offer page 22 page 23 useful advice. That counsel was not taken at Ohaeawai in 1845, so the stubborn British colonel had nearly half his storming party shot down before the stockade in a very few minutes. Thereafter the military began to take notice of the skilful veteran of many battles. Had Nene and his tribe from Hokianga and other hapus influenced by him thrown their weight on the side of Heke, the Northern War would have been prolonged greatly. He was a more shrewd and calculating soldier than the impulsive Heke. A British tribute to his merits described him as an able field - officer. Ever since he first made contact with pakeha ship captains and traders he had acted on the conviction that it was wise policy to keep on good terms with the whites.

Tamati Waka Nene. From a photograph, probably about 1860 (in the collection of Mr. H. E. Flides, Wellington).

There were other considerations which prompted his support of the British forces when the war began. Although Heke was his relative, a kind of junior Highland cousin, there was an utu account to balance. In the cannibal warfare era Hongi Hika, Heke's uncle, had killed Te Tihi at Hokianga, and swallowed his eyes, and Te Tihi was a matua (elder relative) of Nene. So, besides helping the pakeha, Nene, by taking the field with several hundreds of men against Heke and other former followers of Hongi, was working off an old score of his own.

The Tattooed “Young Chevalier.”

Nene was regarded by the greater number of the Ngapuhi nation as a renegade, a foe to his own people. He left them and went to live among the whites at Russell, and died there. He never was so popular among his fellow-countrymen as Heke was, although his wisdom and ability were acknowledged by all. That Maori estimate of Nene remains to this day. Our orators who have so eulogised the friend of the English do not understand the Maori point of view.

Heke was and is the darling of the North. He was the Maori “bonnie Prince Charlie.” A Jacobite-like sentiment persists; everyone admires a gallant rebel, especially if he loses the day. Heke's dash and daring captured the Maori heart as the sage advice and diplomatic wisdom of Nene never could.

“No; chewing is not a refined habit,” said the wholesaler to the reporter, with a laugh, “but it's going out. Most everybody smokes now. Where does all the tobacco come from? Why, chiefly from America, of course. But other countries contribute, and it's astonishing what a lot of toasted New Zealand tobacco goes up in smoke! The true toasted of course, I mean. The manufacturers turn it out by the ton, and the bigger the output the greater the demand seemingly. Why so popular? Well, to begin with the quality's O.K. There's nothing like it! Secondly, the toasting purifies—eliminates the nicotine, and makes these blends perfectly safe to smoke. You can't overdo it with the genuine toasted—Cut Plug No. 10 (Bullshead), Navy Cut No. 3 (Bulldog), Cavendish, Riverhead Gold and Desert Gold. How is the toasting done? Sorry, but I can't tell you. That's the manufacturer's secret. But I've seen the process at the factory. Wonderfully ingenious!” The scribe, well satisfied with his “story,” shut up his note-book and vanished.^*

Oneroa Bay (near Kororareka, Bay of Islands).
Hone Heke's war-party landed in this bay, in rear of Kororareka, on the night of March 10, 1845, and captured the British flagstaff and blockhouse early next morning.