At the first glance it struck me that Pehi Hetau Turoa looked and walked a chief. Taken altogether, he was the finest specimen of his race I had ever seen. In age he appeared to be sixty, or thereabouts, but his stature was that of a well-conditioned athlete. He stood about six feet three, as upright as a dart, big-boned and muscular, and in his younger days he had the reputation of being one of the strongest men of his time. His well-formed features were cast in the true Maori mould, and he had a singularly massive and well-shaped head. Over his closely clipped beard hung a thick moustache, and above this, again, the blue tattooed lines wound round his nostrils, then over his face, and ended in small circles over his brows. During the war Pehi had been a noted Hauhau leader, but, unlike most of the warriors of his race I had met with, he, as if anxious to preserve his military renown, moved about with the air of a well-drilled soldier, while he possessed at all times and in all his actions that genial yet dignified tone of manner so characteristic of the Maori of the old school.
Pehi was at all times a host in himself, and being a man of singularly original and witty train of thought, his conversation was very amusing. Of an evening, when the wharepuni was closed in, the whole hapu would assemble, and squatting down on their mats round the small charcoal fire, the old chief would relate the most singular tales, and ask the most extraordinary questions. He recounted to us some of his experiences in the Maori war, and then asked what nation was at present at war with England? When informed that we were at that time having a brush with Egypt, he inquired if that was not the place where Christ was crucified, and when told that that incident occurred in a neighbouring country, he ejaculated, "Ah, I know I was not far out; a mile or two make no difference in a big event like that." He next inquired what manner of men the Egyptians were, and whether they danced the haka; and when I stated that the Egyptian dancing-girls went through gyrations very similar to those of their dark sisters at the antipodes, he replied, "Then if they dance the haka we must be descended from them. I believe the Maoris are one of the lost tribes of Israel." He asked many questions about England, and the descriptions of London especially amused him, and when told that they had a railway there running underground, he expressed great surprise, and asked how it was that the taniwha we called the devil didn't object to underground railways. He appeared very anxious to learn all about the government of England, and when I had given him a résumé of parliamentary procedure, he pointed towards Te Wao, his henchman, who, strange to say for a Maori, was perfectly bald, and demanded, in a serio-comic way, whether bald-headed men were allowed to sit in the British Parliament, and when I pointed out that a bald-headed man enjoyed equal parliamentary privileges with one having his head covered with hair, he replied that the Maoris always looked with suspicion on bald-headed men. All joined in the laugh at this remark, with the exception of Pehi, who always looked particularly fierce and grim when he cracked his jokes or hurled his shafts of satire.
Although Pehi was singularly jocund for a man of his age, yet when a serious question was put to him he knew how to answer it in a clear and deliberate way; and when I got Turner to induce the rangatira to give the apparent reason for the rapid decay of his race, he spoke thus: "In former times we lived differently; each tribe had its territory. We lived in pas placed high upon the mountains. The men looked to war as their only occupation, and the women and the young people cultivated the fields. We were a strong and a healthy people then. When the pakeha came, everything began to die away, even the natural animals of the country. Formerly, when we went into a forest and stood under a tree, we could not hear ourselves speak for the noise of the birds; every tree was full of them. Then we had pigeons and everything in plenty; now many of the birds have died out. A few years ago there was a big green parrot in these forests; now it is gone, and lots of other things have gradually faded away. In those times the fields were well tilled, there was always plenty of provisions, and we wore few clothes, only our own mats of feathers. Then the missionaries came and took our children from the fields, and taught them to sing hymns; they changed their minds, and the fields were untilled. The children came home and quoted Gospel on an empty stomach. Then came the war between the pakeha and the Maori that split up our homes, and made one tribe fight against another; and after the war came the pakeha settlers, who took our lands, taught us to drink, and to smoke, and made us wear clothes that brought on disease. What race," said the old chief, "could stand against that. The Maori," he continued, "is passing away like the kiwi, the tui, and many other things, and by-and-by they will disappear just as the leaves of the trees, and nothing will remain to tell of them but the names of their mountains and their rivers."
A CHIEF ARMED WITH "MERE" AND "HUATA."
One morning, when we were sunning ourselves in front of the wharepuni, I asked Pehi how the Maoris fought in battle. Without a moment's hesitation he jumped up from where he had been seated, and, casting aside his cape and appearing in nothing but a cloth around his loins, entered a small whare, and emerged an instant afterwards with a huata, or short spear, beautifully carved at the top to represent a grotesque human head, from the mouth of which the tongue protruded about three inches in the form of a spear-blade, while just below the head was a long tuft of white dog's-hair bound with flax stained a bright red. The shaft of the implement, made of totara wood, and highly polished, was rounded at the top part, but widened out in an oval form with sharp, bevelled edges towards the bottom end. Flourishing this weapon about in the wildest way, jumping into the air, making the most hideous grimaces, thrusting out his tongue, and turning up his eyes till nothing but the whites were visible, the old warrior yelled and danced about like a madman, now throwing up his huata in the air and catching it again, now sweeping it round in a way that seemed to carry death in every stroke, the savage, tattooed countenance of the old rangatira working the while in a most diabolical fashion. He made terrific and frantic cuts at each of our heads, but so dexterous was he in the manipulation of his weapon that he arrested it in every instance when within the eighth of an inch of our skulls—which he jocosely told us were not thick enough to hurt the huata.
A "MERE."