Old New Zealand: A Tale of the Good Old Times / And a History of the War in the North against the Chief Heke, in the Year 1845

by Frederick Edward Maning

Now an ancient knight of romance, under similar awkward circumstances, would probably have retired from public life, sought out some forest cave, where he would have hung up his armour, let his beard grow, flogged himself twice a day "regular," and lived on "pulse," which, I suppose, means pea-soup, for the rest of his life. But my old rangatira and his companions had not a morsel of that sort of romance about them. The killing of my friend's father was looked upon as a very clever exploit in itself, though a very unlucky one. So after having scolded one another for some time, one party telling the other they were served right for not keeping a better look out, and the other answering that they should have been sure who they were going to attack before making the onset, they all held a tangi or lamentation for the old warrior who had just received his mittimus; and then killing a prisoner, who they had brought in the canoes for fresh provisions, they had a good feast; after which they returned all together to their own country, taking the body of their lamented relative along with them. This happened many years before I came to the country, and when my rangatira was one of the most famous fighting men in his tribe.

This Maori rangatira, who I am describing, had passed his whole life, with but little intermission, in a scene of battle, murder, and bloodthirsty atrocities of the most terrific description, mixed with actions of the most heroic courage, self-sacrifice, and chivalric daring, as leaves one perfectly astounded to find them the deeds of one and the same people—one day doing acts which had they been performed in ancient Greece would have immortalized the actors, and the next committing barbarities too horrible for relation, and almost incredible.

The effect of a life of this kind was observable, plainly enough, in my friend. He was utterly devoid of what weak mortals call "compassion." He seemed to have no more feeling for the pain, tortures, or death of others than a stone. Should one of his family be dying or wounded, he merely felt it as the loss of one fighting man. As for the death of a woman or any non-combatant, he did not feel it at all, though the person might have suffered horrid tortures; indeed I have seen him scolding severely a fine young man, his near relative, when actually expiring, for being such a fool as to blow himself up by accident, and deprive his family of a fighting man. The last words the dying man heard were these:—"It serves you right. There you are, looking very like a burnt stick! It serves you right—a burnt stick! Serves you right!" It really was vexatious. A fine stout young fellow to be wasted in that way. As for fear, I saw one or two instances to prove he knew very little about it; and, indeed, to be killed in battle, seemed to him a natural death, and he was always grumbling that the young men thought of nothing but trading: and whenever he proposed to them to take him where he might have a final battle (he riri wakamutunga), where he might escape dying of old age, they always kept saying, "Wait till we get more muskets," or "more gunpowder," or more something or another, "as if men could not be killed without muskets!" He was not cruel either; he was only unfeeling. He had been guilty, it is true, in his time, of what we would call terrific atrocities to his prisoners, which he calmly and calculatingly perpetrated as utu or retaliation for similar barbarities committed by them or their tribe. And here I must retract the word guilty, which I see I have written inadvertently, for according to the morals and principles of the people of whom he was one, and of the time to which he belonged, and the training he had received, so far from being guilty, he did a praiseworthy, glorious, and public-spirited action when he opened the jugular vein of a bound captive and sucked huge draughts of his blood. To say the truth he was a very nice old man, and I liked him very much. It would not, however, be advisable to put him in a passion; not much good would be likely to arise from it, as indeed I could show by one or two very striking instances which came under my notice, though to say the truth he was not easily put out of temper. He had one great moral rule,—it was indeed his rule of life,—he held that every man had a right to do everything and anything he chose, provided he was able and willing to stand the consequences, though he thought some men fools for trying to do things which they could not carry out pleasantly, and which ended in getting them baked. I once hinted to him that, should every one reduce these principles to practice, he himself might find it awkward, particularly as he had so many mortal enemies. To which he replied, with a look which seemed to pity my ignorance, that every one did practise this rule to the best of their abilities, but that some were not so able as others; and that as for his enemies, he should take care they never surprised him; a surprise being, indeed, the only thing he seemed to have any fear at all of. In truth he had occasion to look out sharp; he never was known to sleep more than three or four nights in the same place, and often, when there were ill omens, he would not sleep in a house at all, or two nights following in one place, for a month together, and I never saw him without both spear and tomahawk, and ready to defend himself at a second's notice, a state of preparation perfectly necessary, for though in his own country and surrounded by his tribe, his death would have been such a triumph for hundreds, not of distant enemies, but of people within a day's journey, that none could tell at what moment some stout young fellow in search of utu and a "ingoa toa" (a warlike reputation) might rush upon him, determined to have his head or leave his own. The old buck himself had, indeed, performed several exploits of this nature, the last of which occurred just at the time I came into the country, but before I had the advantage of his acquaintance. His tribe were at war with some people at the distance of about a day's journey. One of their villages was on the border of a dense forest. My rangatira, then a very old man, started off alone, and without saying a word to any one, took his way through the forest which extended the whole way between his village and the enemy, crept like a lizard into the enemy's village, and then, shouting his war cry, dashed amongst a number of people he saw sitting together on the ground, and who little expected such a salute. In a minute he had run three men and one woman through the body, received five dangerous spear-wounds himself, and escaped to the forest, and finally got safe home to his own country and people. Truly my old rangatira was a man of a thousand,—a model rangatira. This exploit, if possible, added to his reputation, and every one said his mana would never decline. The enemy had been panic-stricken, thinking a whole tribe were upon them, and fled like a flock of sheep, except the three men who were killed. They all attacked my old chief at once, and were all disposed of in less than a minute, after, as I have said, giving him five desperate wounds. The woman was just "stuck," as a matter of course, as she came in his way.

The natives are unanimous in affirming that they were much more numerous in former times than they are now, and I am convinced that such was the case, for the following reasons. The old hill forts are many of them so large that an amount of labour must have been expended in trenching, terracing, and fencing them, and all without iron tools, which increased the difficulty a hundred-fold, which must have required a vastly greater population to accomplish than can be now found in the surrounding districts. These forts were also of such an extent that, taking into consideration the system of attack and defence used necessarily in those times, they would have been utterly untenable unless held by at least ten times the number of men the whole surrounding districts, for two or three days' journey, can produce; and yet, when we remember that in those times of constant war, being the two centuries preceding the arrival of the Europeans, the natives always, as a rule, slept in these hill forts with closed gates, bridges over trenches removed, and ladders of terraces drawn up, we must come to the conclusion that the inhabitants of the fort, though so numerous, were merely the population of the country in the close vicinity. Now from the top of one of these pointed, trenched, and terraced hills, I have counted twenty others, all of equally large dimensions, and all within a distance, in every direction, of fifteen to twenty miles; and native tradition affirms that each of these hills was the stronghold of a separate hapu or clan, bearing its distinctive name. There is also the most unmistakeable evidence that vast tracts of country, which have lain wild time out of mind, were once fully cultivated. The ditches for draining the land are still traceable, and large pits are to be seen in hundreds, on the tops of the dry hills, all over the northern part of the North Island, in which the kumera were once stored; and these pits are, in the greatest number, found in the centre of great open tracts of uncultivated country, where a rat in the present day would hardly find subsistence. The old drains, and the peculiar growth of the timber, mark clearly the extent of these ancient cultivations. It is also very observable that large tracts of very inferior land have been in cultivation, which would lead to the inference that either the population was pretty nearly proportioned to the extent of available land, or that the tracts of inferior land were cultivated merely because they were not too far removed from the fort; for the shape of the hill, and its capability of defence and facility of fortification, was of more consequence than the fertility of the surrounding country. These kumera pits, being dug generally in the stiff clay on the hill tops, have, in most cases, retained their shape perfectly, and many seem as fresh and new as if they had been dug but a few years. They are oblong in shape, with the sides regularly sloped. Many collections of these provision stores have outlived Maori tradition, and the natives can only conjecture who they belonged to. Out of the centre of one of them which I have seen, there is now growing a kauri tree one hundred and twenty feet high, and out of another a large totara. The outline of these pits is as perfect as the day they were dug, and the sides have not fallen in in the slightest degree, from which perhaps they have been preserved by the absence of frost, as well as by a beautiful coating of moss, by which they are everywhere covered. The pit in which the kauri grew, had been partially filled up by the scaling off of the bark of the tree, which falling off in patches, as it is constantly doing, had raised a mound of decaying bark round the root of the tree.

Another evidence of a very large number of people having once inhabited these hill forts is the number of houses they contained. Every native house, it appears, in former times as in the present, had a fire-place composed of four flat stones or flags sunk on their edges into the ground, so as to form an oblong case or trunk, in which at night a fire to heat the house was made. Now, in two of the largest hill forts I have examined, though for ages no vestige of a house had been seen, there remained the fire-places—the four stones projecting like an oblong box slightly over the ground—and from their position and number denoting clearly that, large as the circumference of the huge volcanic hill was which formed the fortress, the number of families inhabiting it necessitated the strictest economy of room. The houses had been arranged in streets, or double rows, with a path between them, except in places where there had been only room on a terrace for a single row. The distances between the fire-places proved that the houses in the rows must have been as close together as it was possible to build them, and every spot, from the foot to the hill top, not required and specially planned for defensive purposes, had been built on in this regular manner. Even the small flat top, sixty yards long by forty wide,—the citadel,—on which the greatest care and labour had been bestowed to render it difficult of access, had been as full of houses as it could hold, leaving a small space all round the precipitous bank for the defenders to stand on.

These little fire-places, and the scarped and terraced conical hills, are the only marks the Maori of ancient times have left of their existence. And I have reasons for believing that this country has been inhabited from a more remote period by far than is generally supposed. These reasons I found upon the dialect of the Maori language spoken by the Maori of New Zealand, as well as on many other circumstances.

We may easily imagine that a hill of this kind, covered from bottom to top with houses thatched and built of reeds, rushes, and raupo, would be a mere mass of combustible matter, and such indeed was the case. When an enemy attacked one of these places a common practice was to shower red-hot stones from slings into the place, which, sinking into the dry thatch of the houses, would cause a general conflagration. Should this once occur the place was sure to be taken, and this mode of attack was much feared; all hands not engaged at the outer defences, and all women and non-combatants, were employed guarding against this danger, and pouring water out of calabashes on every smoke that appeared. The natives also practised both mining and escalade in attacking a hill fort.

The natives attribute their decrease in numbers, before the arrival of the Europeans, to war and sickness, disease possibly arising from the destruction of food and the forced neglect of cultivation caused by the constant and furious wars which devastated the country for a long period before the arrival of the Europeans, in such a manner that the natives at last believed that a constant state of warfare was the natural condition of life, and their sentiments, feelings, and maxims became gradually formed on this belief. Nothing was so valuable or respectable as strength and courage, and to acquire property by war and plunder was more honourable and also more desirable than by labour. Cannibalism was glorious. The island was a pandemonium.

A rugged wight, the worst of brutes, was man;
On his own wretched kind he ruthless prey'd.
The strongest then the weakest overran,
In every country mighty robbers sway'd,
And guile and ruffian force was all their trade.

Since the arrival of the Europeans the decrease of the natives has also been rapid. In that part of the country where I have had means of accurate observation, they have decreased in number since my arrival rather more than one-third. I have, however, observed that this decrease has for the last ten years been very considerably checked, though I do not believe this improvement is general through the country, or even permanent where I have observed it.