“Te Kitohi.”

There was a missionary of the second generation whom I knew very well and met frequently on his travels among his native friends in the Waikato and North Auckland. No better and wiser and more kindly teacher and preacher ever lived and laboured here than the Rev. William Gittos, “Te Kitohi,” as the Maoris called him. He arrived in New Zealand at the age of twelve with the Scottish immigrants from Glasgow, in 1842; he became a thorough pioneer in the North Auckland bush, and he saw something of the Northern War about Lake Omapere in 1845 when Hone Heke was “out.” He gave up farm life to become a missionary, for which his knowledge of the people, his command of the Maori tongue, and his sympathy with church work qualified him, and in 1856 he began work at the Kaipara, where he continued to labour among the Ngati-Whatua and related tribes until the middle Eighties. Then his sphere of activities was extended, and he became Superintendent of Maori Missions in Waikato and North Auckland until he retired in 1913. He died in Auckland in 1916.

Mr. Gittos was not only a missionary but a pioneer with a practical knowledge of many things useful in wild country where the settler had to do without the services of professional doctors and skilled artisans and tradesmen. He was something of a doctor himself, for he could set broken bones, extract teeth, tend wounds, and on one occasion he amputated a leg to save a man's life. He did all without any thought of compensation; he helped the new settlers of the Kaipara and the adjacent parts in a hundred ways, his reward was their gratitude.