In those war-days of 1860-70 dense forests covered the wide plains of this Taranaki province, where now most of the dark old woods have been hewn away, and have given place to the pastures and homesteads of dairy farmers. It was a wild but beautiful land. The coast curved out and round in a great sweeping semicircle from Waitara in the north to Wanganui in the south; the intervening region of forest, hill, and plain was the theatre of war. High and central, Taranaki's great mountain-cone, which the pakeha calls Egmont, swelled to a height of over 8,000 feet, its base hidden in the forests, its snowy peak glittering far above the broad soft swathes of clouds, the sailor's landmark a hundred miles out at sea. Remote from all other high mountains it soared aloft—"lonely as God and white as a winter morn," as Joaquin Miller wrote of his beloved Mount Shasta. On all sides Taranaki—the holy mountain of the Maoris—sloped evenly and gently to the plains, and from its recesses sprang the head waters of many a beautiful river. The mountain, huge yet exquisitely symmetrical, was revered by the old-school Taranaki Maori as the mighty symbol of his nationality, and regarded as being in some mystic fashion the source of his tribal mana. Under the shadow of Taranaki began the Ten Years' War; here the Hauhau fanaticism took its mad rise in 1864. From Taranaki's foot set out the Hauhau apostles, preaching a strange jumble of Scriptural expressions and pagan Maori concepts, promising their converts that no pakeha bullet should harm them if they but repeated their magic incantations; and brandishing before the ranks of their devotees the dried and smoked heads of slain white soldiers. The relapse into barbarism was more marked in Taranaki than anywhere else, and even to this day the hatred of the white man lingers there, amongst the remnants of the old Hauhau stock. Te Whiti, the Prophet of Parihaka, until his death in 1907, held his court under the shadow of lofty Taranaki, and preached his old mysticism fortified by the towering presence of his mountain-god, cold and immutable, and all unmindful of the pakeha's march through the plains below.
MOUNT EGMONT, TARANAKI.
In March, 1864, the 57th were ordered from New Plymouth to Manawapou (not far from the present town of Hawera), near the Tangahoé River. The fanatic Hauhau faith had just been born amongst the Maoris, whose palisaded pas dotted the outskirts of the great forests on the farther side of the Tangahoé, and whose war-songs could sometimes be heard from the white soldiers' camp. At Manawapou the regiment went under canvas, and now began the regular round of sentry-go and outpost duty, and all the preparations for an advance on the rebel positions.
A TARANAKI FRONTIER FORT.
(Sketch by Mr. S. Percy Smith, 1865.)
Meantime there was fighting in the northern and western parts of the Taranaki province, between the 57th camp and New Plymouth. There was the disastrous affair at Te Ahuahu, where Captain Lloyd and several soldiers were killed; their heads were cut off and smoke-dried by the Hauhau savages, and were carried away to distant tribes by Kereopa, Patara, and other rebel emissaries, the Hauhau recruiting officers. Another momentous affair which happened soon after the 57th took post at Manawapou was the desperate assault on the British redoubt at Sentry Hill (Te Morere). A large force of Hauhau warriors, deluded by their prophet Hepanaia into believing that his incantations rendered them invulnerable to the white man's bullets, rushed against the redoubt in open daylight one morning, but were beaten off, leaving some fifty of their number lying dead in front of the fort. It was in this engagement that Titokowaru—who was afterwards Kimble Bent's chief and master—lost one of his eyes through a bullet wound.