page 199

Patriots of the Taranaki Border

THAT picture of mountain and forest is sharp in the mind's eye to-day even after many years, the view of glorious old Taranaki from the little Maori kainga called Hokorima, eight miles from Hawera town. The grassy fields, the semi-primitive dwellings and the gardens of potatoes and maize, and the distance between spires of soft foliage filled in with a wash of smoky-blue forest and the soaring white-topped peak of a godlike serenity lifting eight thousand feet into the glowing sky. The mountain crest hung in the heavens, utterly removed from the lower world. It seemed the Tikitiki-o-Rangi, the shining throne of Io of the Hidden Face. On the green marae in front of the principal house in Hokorima, the head-village of Nga-Ruahine, we sat and talked with Tauke, the grand old man of that fighting sub-tribe of Ngati-Ruanui, and heard some of the tales of his warrior youth and the nature-talk of Taranaki mountain. All through the wars the stubborn patriots of the plains invoked the Mountain, the emblem of their nationality, its peak their majestic guardian, its tangled forests their refuge place.

Tauke, sitting there that morning on his sunny lawn, with a coloured blanket girt about his waist, his old white head bare, his spectacles on his nose, poring over the ecstatic visions of the Dreamer in “Te Whakakitenga,” the Book of Revelation, looked the mystic and the priest. He was a priest of two religions, the ancient Maori and the pakeha, the lay-reader of his people and at the same time the last of the tohungas of Ngati-Ruanui. page 200 He was the instructor of the whare-maire, the school of legend and tradition, genealogies and the Polynesian-Maori religion from remote generations; for the Taranaki Maoris were, at that time, if they are not still, intensely conservative and inimical to the European faiths and ways. His beliefs were a curious blend of ancient and modern, the old faith overlaid by the missionaries' Rongo-Pai. Long ago he was one of the desperate warriors whom the Pai-marire priests of battle led in furious assault against British frontier forts. Now in his wise old age, well on in his eighties, he was able in his half-humorous way to regard with calm introspective vision those fiery years when he fought for land and Maori nationality.

The old man laid aside his fifty-year-old Maori Bible, and took off his glasses, when we greeted him, and he courteously pointed to the flax mats on the lawn beside him. Calm, deep penetrating eyes peered out from under white-bushed buttresses of brows. One of his hands was scarred and mutilated, the thumb and part of a finger missing. “That happened at Te Morere,” said Tauke.

He was steeped in warrior ways from his earliest youth. He was born in captivity; his parents were taken away from the Waimate Plains in one of the raids of the Waikato cannibal tribes of more than a century ago. When peace returned he and many of his people were liberated and returned to Taranaki. As a young man he was one of the Taranaki chiefs who went to the Waikato to share in the uplifting of Te Wherowhero, or Potatau—his old hereditary enemy—as the first King of the Maoris, and he was at Ngaruawahia, at the royal page 201 camp, where the Waikato and Waipa rivers meet, when the Taranaki war began in 1860. Hurrying back to his tribe, Tauke fought against the Imperial and Colonial troops at the battle of Waireka, on the seaward side of the Mountain, where the Taranaki settlers for the first time met their Maori neighbours in fight. He was, he said, the Christian “missionary” to his tribe at Waireka; for the Maori was devout in war as in peace, as fanatically religious as the Crusaders and Cromwell's Roundheads and the Moslem warriors. Then in 1864 he became a Hauhau, and he was one of the crazy band of heroes and fanatics who charged upon the British redoubt at Sentry Hill, or Te Morere. The railway from New Plymouth to Waitara passes within a few yards of the spot where, upon a little ferny hill, now demolished, the Imperial soldiers who manned the redoubt poured a storm of death from their rifles and cohorn mortars upon the naked storming party.

It was a mad endeavour; Tauke admitted as much himself with a grin, when he told the story of his wounded hand.

Hepanaia, the Prophet, led the attack; he was more valiant than prudent. There were fifty men of the 57th Regiment in the redoubt; the steep hillside was scarped nearly twenty feet high all round the little fort, making it practically impregnable to any Maori war party. However, Hepanaia, Kingi, Titokowaru and Tauke led on their men, hapu by hapu, and after a Pai-marire service they advanced up the hill upon the redoubt, in close order. As they went they steadily recited their prayers. “Hapa, hapa, hapa! Pai-marire!” This was the incantation to ward off the enemy bullets. Tauke page 202 used his double-barrelled gun; his tomahawk was in his belt for close-quarters work; he was stripped except for a loin mat; his cheeks and brow were painted red for battle.

As the Hauhaus breasted the hill, shoulder to shoulder, gripping gun and long-handled tomahawk, the top of the parapet blazed fire and down the head of the column was swept. Repeated rifle volleys spread death and mutilation among the deluded warriors. More than fifty were killed; some the Hauhaus dragged off the field, and thirty-three were buried there by the British after the fight. A bullet struck Tauke's hand, and he was a disabled man for some months thereafter. Eight of his Ngaruahine relatives fell in that desperate assault upon a parapeted redoubt in open day. There was one satisfaction: Hepanaia, the false prophet, who had foretold an easy victory—for the pakeha bullets would be sure to fly wide of the faithful—found a grave on the field of battle.

That story of the recklessly valiant charge on an impregnable fort was told with dramatic gesture and more than a touch of the youthful fighting fire. “But now,” he said, “the years that remain to me are few. I read my Bible, and I teach my young people of Ngati-Ruanui the religion and the history of old, for there is good both in this Book and in those karakias of our fore-fathers. Now there is peace, and the guns lie at rest in the house, and the sounds of cultivation work are heard on the warriors' parade-ground. Our ramrods are made into fish-hooks to catch hapuku out there beyond the river-mouth.”

page 203

It was perhaps in keeping with the complex of ancient priest and latter-day sage in Tauke's character that the burial ceremony, when he was laid to rest in 1916, should have been preceded by a poi dance by the women of Ngati-Ruanui—as at his fellow-philosopher Te Whiti's obsequies ten years previously—and that the high wild chants of the past should have blended with the pakeha rites that blessed him in the bosom of his Mother-Earth.

∗ ∗ ∗

There was one of Tauke's fellow-tribesmen and war-comrades who was less of a calm philosopher, more of a still militant-minded patriot of Taranaki, with whom I had more than one greatly-revealing talk. He was Te Kahu-pukoro, the leading chief of the Ngati-Ruanui tribe. I last visited him in August, 1920, at his home at Aoroa, near Otakeho, reached by a road leading from Manaia in the direction of Mt. Egmont.

His farm, of good volcanic soil, enriched by ages of forest, was still encumbered with half-burned and felled bush. His young people tended the crops and the dairy herd. “We are tamed now,” said the old man, “we are a tribe that works at milking cows [iwi-wahi-mirika].”

Te Kahu-pukoro was a tall, thickly-built broad-shouldered man, of large open features, clean shaven. His wild, glittering eyes heightened the dramatic fire of some of his narratives of the wars, the battles in which he engaged while still a boy, and they glared as fiercely when he declaimed against the land-confiscation that had stripped his defeated but unconquerable people of most of their ancestral domains. That warrior glint seldom left the dark, shining eyes of Ngati-Ruanui's chieftain.

page 204

“I was only eight years old when I first watched a battle between pakeha and Maori,” said Te Kahupukoro. “That was the fight at Waireka and Kaipopo Pa [in 1860], Four years later I was in the fighting ranks; I was a big strong lad, quite fit for the warpath. I was armed with a single-barrel gun, and I used it, in the attack of our Pai-marire war-party on the British fort at Te Morere, with Tauke. Many of my relatives fell there. My father, Tiopira, and his brother, Hapeta, were killed on the field, and my grandfather, Tamati Hone, afterwards composed and chanted a song of lamentation for his slain sons. I was wounded there; narrowly did I escape the fate of my brothers and cousins.

“We were perfectly fearless in that attack; we were whakamomori [desperate, reckless, despairing] because we were inspired by the spirit of our new faith, the Pai-marire. Families fell there; my tribesmen, young and old, fell in heaps. I cried ‘Hapa, hapa, hapa!’ [pass over], waving the bullets of our foes over my shoulders, as Te Ua the Prophet had taught us. But that karakia lost its magic before the pakeha bullets; one of them struck me in the left shoulder, and another penetrated my left hip, but missed the bone. But I was so excited and crazed by the fury of battle that I did not feel the first bullet until I felt my shirt wet with blood. When we retreated I went down to a little stream and bathed and stanched my wounds, and then we all retreated to Manutahi, where my wounds were treated and healed.”

There was many another battle and bush skirmish for Te Kahu-pukoro. He was wounded again at Punga-rehu, when that bush village was attacked just before page 205 break of day one morning in 1866 by Major McDonnell and his Rangers. He fought in nearly every engagement until the end of the Taranaki War in 1869.

So telling, with glare of eye and vigorous gesture—now and again forgetting his rheumatism and jumping to his feet in the excitement of his narrative—the veteran of the old campaigns returned to that Sentry Hill attack that failed. It was Taranaki's day of mourning, a Flodden Field of the Maori. He chanted in a strong hard voice the great tangi chant composed by his grand-father, Tamati Hone, for Te Morere, Ngati-Ruanui's grief-call that is sung to this day over the dead of the tribe. The chant begins with the classic allusion to the lightning-flashes on certain hills that betoken disaster and death:

“Hikohiko te uira i tai ra
Kapo taratahi ki Turamoe,
Ko he tohu o te mate e nunumi ake nei.”
(“The lightning flashes seaward yonder,
It strikes downward on Turamoe hill;
’Tis heaven's omen of battle and death.”)

It is a long and thrilling poem (given in full in my “History of the Maori Wars”). This is the concluding portion of my translation; the chant proceeds, after lamenting the fall of Tiopira and Hapeta:

“O heroes of my house,
How brave that charge,
Beyond Whakaahurangi's woods that day!
Lonely I lie within my home
Beside Kapuni's river mouth.
And cherish bitter thoughts, and ever weep—
My sons!
page 206 Still o'er the forest, still above the clouds
Towers Taranaki;
But Kingi's gone. Wise in council,
Foremost in the fight.
I searched the reddened field; I found him dead
At Morere!
How vain your valour, vain your charge
Against Morere's walls!
Lost on that rocky coast of death
Are all my crews—
Tainui, Tokomaru, Kurahaupo, Aotea—
Ah me! My wrecked canoes
Lie broken on the shore!”

∗ ∗ ∗

That poem of mourning for the warrior dead was chanted over Te Kahu-pukoro himself when the old soldier of the Tekau-ma-rua (“The Twelve,” the term applied to Titokowaru's war-parties) died, towards the end of 1920.

Readers of Celtic history and bagpipe lore may be reminded of “MacCrimmon's Lament for the Children,” the famous pibroch of mourning composed by the ancient piper Padruig Mor MacCrimmon, of Skye, in memory of his seven stalwart sons carried off by death.