The warrior indicated would be questioned by the war-chief, and asked whether his "heart was strong" within him. If his answer were deemed satisfactory, he would be told off as one of the Tekau-ma-rua, the sanctified advance-guard.
Again and again this strange method of divination was repeated, the balanced weapon indicating—to the perfect satisfaction of the superstitious Hauhaus—the men whom the Maori war-god desired as the instruments of vengeance on the whites. Name after name the priest and chief pronounced, as his taiaha pointed along the squatting ranks, until the tale of bare-legged warriors was complete.
Then, when the taua, or war-party, had filled their cartridge-belts and seen to their weapons, there was a ceremony of a livelier sort. The women and girls of the pa attired themselves in their waist piupiu of coloured flax, decked their hair with feathers, dabbed ochre-paint on their cheeks, and lined up on the marae for the poi-dance, to send the warriors off "in good heart," as the Maori has it. Hakas, too, were danced by the men and boys of the village, and the merry poi-songs and the loudly yelled war-chants put a brisker jig into the feet of the brown soldiers as they marched out of the settlement and struck into the forest, hunting for pakehas.
As the men of the Tekau-ma-rua left the stockade, Titokowaru himself would loudly farewell them, shouting in his terrible gruff voice the ferocious injunction:
"Patua, kainga! Patua, kainga! E kai mau! Kaua e tukua kia haere! Kia mau ki tou ringa." ("Kill them! Eat them! Kill them! Eat them! Let them not escape! Hold them fast in your hands.")
Should the Tekau-ma-rua meet with success in their murderous raids, it was usual for the leader of the party to chant in a loud voice, as the home-palisades were neared, a song beginning, "Tenei te mea kei te mou ki toku ringa," meaning that he had in his hand a portion of the flesh of a slain pakeha. This was called the mawé; it was an offering to the god of war. The mawé was almost invariably a human heart, torn from the body of the first man of the enemy killed in the fight.
On two or three occasions Kimble Bent witnessed the ceremony of the offering of the mawé, the ancient rite of the Whangai-hau. The heart (manawa) or other piece of human flesh, was brought into the marae and given to a man named Tihirua, who was the priest of the burnt sacrifice. He was a young man about twenty-five years of age, belonging to the Ngati-Maru tribe, of the Upper Waitara. "He would take the heart in his hand," says Bent, "and strike a match, or take a firestick and singe the flesh. When it was slightly scorched he would throw it away; it was tapu to Uenuku. This was an ancient war-custom of the Maoris; Titokowaru adopted it because he believed it would cause the pakehas to lose strength and courage, and become unnerved in time of battle. After the fight at Papa-tihakehake, in 1868, I saw this man Tihirua cut a white man's body open outside the marae, tear out the bleeding heart, hold lighted matches underneath it until it was singed, and then throw it away." [5]
A more frightful scene still that the sun looked down upon in that forest den was a cannibal feast. On June 12, 1868, a party of about fifteen Hauhaus from the pa, prowling out in the direction of the Waihi redoubt, cut off and shot and tomahawked a trooper of the Armed Constabulary, a man named Smith, who had incautiously ventured out to look for his horse beyond rifle-range of the redoubt. An Armed Constabulary officer, who happened to be walking across the parade ground at the time, heard and saw the firing, and with his field-glasses distinctly saw the flashing of the tomahawks as the Hauhaus cut the man to pieces. An armed party was immediately sent out at the double, but all they found when they reached the spot was half the body! The legs and hips were lying on the trampled and blood-drenched ground amongst the fern; the head and the upper part of the body down to the waist had been carried off by the savages, who had vanished into the forest as quickly as they had come. The remains of the poor trooper were cooked and eaten by the people in Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu, after the heart had been offered to Titokowaru's god of war by the young priest Tihirua.
Titokowaru, according to Bent, did not eat human flesh himself, but a boastful letter sent by him a few days later to a philo-pakeha chief at Mawhitiwhiti, seems to indicate that he was a cannibal of the most ferocious sort, unless, as is quite possible, he was speaking of his people generally when he used the first person singular. In this letter, addressed to Puano, and dated "Wharé-kura, June 25, 1868," he wrote this emphatic warning: