In January, 1859, the greater part of the regiment was brought together under Lieutenant-Colonel Call, and made many marches through the district of Jaulna, vainly pursuing Rohilla freebooters who had no intention of standing up to fight. As soon as these robber bands dispersed, the XVIIIth went back to garrison duty at detached posts, and in three or four months, when the country had begun to settle down, most of the companies joined headquarters at Sholapur, and then marched to Hyderabad in the Deccan, which they reached on June 21, 1859. The muster roll shows that three officers, Captain W. F. G. Forster, Lieutenant T. Watt, and Assistant-Surgeon C. E. Porteous, and twenty-seven of the rank and file died of disease during the Indian Mutiny campaign.[182]
[CHAPTER IX.]
1858-1882.
RAISING OF THE SECOND BATTALION: THE WAR IN NEW ZEALAND.
After the Indian Mutiny a considerable increase in the strength of the army was sanctioned by Parliament, for the reasons stated in [chapter x.], and additional units of infantry were raised, not as new regiments but as second battalions of existing organisations. The XVIIIth was one of the regiments selected for this augmentation, and on March 25, 1858, forty-four years after the original second battalion had been disbanded,[183] the nucleus of a new second battalion was formed at Enniskillen by the transfer from the first battalion of a hundred seasoned soldiers.[184] A hundred and fifty men joined from the Dublin City militia; other militia regiments contributed volunteers, and recruits came in fast from the north of Ireland. For the first few months of its existence the new battalion was in charge of Major A. W. S. F. Armstrong; then Lieutenant-Colonel A. N. Campbell, on promotion from the first battalion, assumed the command which he continued to hold until October, 1859, when he exchanged with Lieutenant-Colonel A. A. Chapman, 48th regiment. In the same month the battalion was sent to England, and two years later to the Channel Isles, where the detachment at Alderney did good service in fighting a great fire which threatened to devastate the island. Though the greater part of the rank and file was composed of growing lads, “the ready and willing spirit displayed by all and their coolness under such circumstances”[185] greatly impressed the local authorities. This incident proved, if proof had been necessary, that the task of converting a mass of recruits into trained and disciplined soldiers had been entrusted to good hands; and early in 1863, the second battalion was considered to be fit for foreign service, and was selected to relieve one of the regiments then garrisoning New Zealand. When the various detachments from Jersey, Guernsey, and Alderney had concentrated at Parkhurst in the Isle of Wight, they were inspected by Major-General Lord William Paulet, who in a complimentary speech commented with pleasure on the great increase in the height of the men since he had last seen the battalion eighteen months before.
On April 2, 1863, the headquarters and eight companies under command of Lieutenant-Colonel Chapman sailed from Portsmouth in the ship Elizabeth Anne Bright, followed on the 12th by the two service companies under Brevet-Colonel G. J. Carey in the ship Norwood.[186] The depôt companies were stationed at Buttevant. After a prosperous and, for a sailing-ship, a rapid voyage of ninety-one days, the Elizabeth Anne Bright on the 4th of July reached Auckland, where three weeks later the Norwood arrived also. When the leading ship dropped anchor, the Royal Irish learned that war had broken out with the natives, and that the battalion was to take the field at once. Before describing the part played by the XVIIIth in the campaign a short account must be given of the Maoris, the enemy at whose hands the second battalion was to receive its baptism of fire. According to native traditions, New Zealand was peopled many centuries ago by an adventurous race (said by ethnologists to be of Malay stock) who, swarming off from the Melanesian archipelago, crossed the Southern Pacific in war canoes and landed in New Zealand, which they named the Land of the Long White Cloud. Either the country was uninhabited or the aborigines were easily conquered, for no trace of their presence is found in Maori folklore. The newcomers first occupied the coasts, and then gradually spread over the whole of the North and South islands, forming clans which recognised no central authority and held all land within their borders as the property not of individuals but of the tribe. Between the tribes there was incessant strife, which hardened the Maoris into a nation of fighting men, skilled not only in every wile of savage warfare but also, as we shall see, in the art of fortifying their strongholds.
The existence of the Maoris and the very position of the country they inhabited remained unknown to Europeans until 1642, when Tasman, the great Dutch navigator, sighted the Land of the Long White Cloud. His government kept the information to themselves; and Captain Cook, a British explorer even more celebrated than his Dutch forerunner, rediscovered New Zealand in 1769, established friendly relations with the natives, and took formal possession of the country for his sovereign, George III. But neither at that time nor for many years later was England in the mood to develop her new acquisition. Her conflict with the American colonists, her struggle with the European coalition which supported their rebellion, and her gigantic efforts to save the Continent of Europe from the domination of Napoleon, had taxed her resources to the utmost; and it was not until seventy years after Cook had annexed the country that definite official steps were taken to assert British authority in New Zealand. But long before our Government decided to occupy the islands, adventurous Britons had established themselves among the Maoris. The penal settlement, formed towards the close of the eighteenth century at Sydney, provided a port from which New Zealand became accessible from the mainland of Australia, and a brisk trade gradually sprang up between the natives and ship’s captains in timber, potatoes, and native flax. Nor were these the only articles of commerce. Collectors of curiosities in Europe were eager to possess specimens of the tattooing or face ornamentation for which the Maoris were celebrated, and the heads of warriors, defeated and slain in battle and preserved as trophies in the villages of the victors, were eagerly exchanged for the muskets with which the white strangers were armed. By degrees little settlements of Europeans grew up at various points along the coast—each an Alsatia to which escaped convicts, deserters from the garrison of Sydney, run-away sailors, riff-raff of every kind, sought a refuge from the trammels of civilisation. Many of these wanderers threw in their lot with the natives: some perished miserably; others were well treated and lived with the Maoris for many years. A few of the survivors were men of some education, and from their reminiscences, and those of the missionaries and pioneers who arrived from England in the early “forties,” it is possible to form an idea of the Maoris before they became tamed by British influence. Their character as a nation was very complex. Though cannibals, and bloodthirsty to a degree, their sense of honour was high, and their word once pledged was considered inviolable. They were by no means devoid of chivalry; their language was full of poetry; their manners were dignified; their laws were well defined, and the tenure of land and the ownership of movable property were regulated by customs, enforced by the power of the whole clan.
In the course of years the condition of the European settlements became a serious scandal; law and order were unknown, and there were constant collisions between the natives and the Europeans, in which the white men appear to have been frequently the aggressors. The Governor of New South Wales, who was supposed to exercise a shadowy authority over the British in New Zealand, reported strongly to the Colonial Office on the subject, and the missionaries loudly complained that their efforts among the Maoris were hampered by the presence of a considerable number of Europeans, whose conduct was unrestrained by any form of government. In 1840, England yielded to the pressure of public opinion and formally annexed New Zealand. This step, ostensibly taken solely for the benefit of the Maoris, was also influenced by political considerations, for the French had long desired to establish themselves in the Southern Pacific: ever since the time of Cook their ships had occasionally visited New Zealand, and it was known that France was preparing to found a colony in the South island. An English frigate, the Druid, sailed with the newly-appointed Governor about the same time as L’Aube, a French man-of-war started in charge of a transport full of emigrants for New Zealand. Our ship outstripped the French vessels, and when L’Aube reached the South island her captain, to his bitter mortification, found that the Union Jack had been hoisted forty-eight hours before!
The terms upon which New Zealand passed into the hands of the Crown were almost unique in the history of England. Our possessions in the East have been won by the sword in wars forced upon us by the lawlessness of the neighbouring States. In America the presence of a large French garrison in Canada and at the mouth of the St Lawrence was a thunder cloud constantly overhanging the New England colonies until we captured Quebec in the Seven Years’ War. In the southern hemisphere Australia was a no-man’s land—a wilderness inhabited only by a few tribes of degraded savages. The necessity of defending the colonists in South Africa against the attacks of marauding Kaffirs has caused the gradual extension of British rule from Cape Town on the Atlantic to Zululand on the Indian Ocean. But in New Zealand the chiefs were treated as our equals when, at the solemn treaty of Waitanga in 1840, they ceded on behalf of their clans the sovereignty of their territories to Queen Victoria, and accepted her protection, and with it all the rights and privileges of British subjects.
For several years after this treaty was made the country seemed thoroughly quiet: large numbers of emigrants arrived from England and prospered greatly in their new homes; and the majority of Maoris appeared to acquiesce in our presence. Some of the clans were glad to be saved from internecine strife; others appreciated the increased demand for their staple productions of flax and timber, which was one of the results of the European influx; but others again, especially the tribes in the centre of the North island, grew dissatisfied with the new order of things, and elected a king to rule over them, who established a capital at Ngaruawahia, a strategic point at the junction of the Waikato and Waipa rivers.[187] From a mistaken policy of non-intervention this movement was not put down, and it rapidly degenerated into openly expressed antagonism towards the settlers. In 1862, to quote the words of one of the Ministers of the Crown, it “presented the following features:—