The natives at this time were very indignant because the Governor had forbidden them to have arms; and one chief had said to him: “My custom is to give my enemy a weapon if he has not one, that we may fight upon equal terms. Now, O Governor, are you not ashamed of my defenceless hands.” Soon after this an English carter and his boy were murdered by the Maoris. Shortly afterwards, the Bishop, on his travels through the country, was sitting round the fire with a large party of natives, who were telling him some of their national myths. He said: “Now I will tell you a ghost story. There was once a man who dreamt that he was sitting with a large party round the fire, when out of the fire rose the figure of a man who said, ‘O Governor if I had an enemy and he had no weapon, I would give him one before we fought. O Governor were you not ashamed of my defenceless hands?’ The people all applauded, but the dream went further. ‘After a time another figure rose up slowly out of the fire, with a white face, very pale, with blood streaming down; the figure was dressed like an English boy and held a bullock whip. He too stretched out his arms to the Maoris and said, ‘Were you not ashamed of my defenceless hands?’” The Bishop refused to interpret the story, but it was passed on amongst the Maoris, and told by many a camp fire. All knew its meaning.
On one of these walks, the people in a particular village were persuaded not to receive the Bishop, but to offer him a pigstye for his night’s shelter. The Bishop at once set to work to turn out the pigs, clean the stye and make himself a bed of clean ferns. This made the astonished Maoris say: “You cannot degrade that man from being a gentleman.”
For some time an uncertain kind of peace prevailed, but the irritation among the natives was all the time on the increase, and the trouble more and more took the form of hostility on the part of the natives as a whole to the whites. The chiefs in the Waikato began to gather their forces to come to the help of the Maoris in the Taranaki district. Bishop Selwyn, anxious to check the growth of this hostile Maori feeling, went to a Conference of Maoris, where on the Sunday the Maori chief preached to the assembled people on the text: “Behold how good and joyful a thing it is, brethren, to dwell together in unity”; and spoke of the gain it was that the Maoris were now joined together as one brotherhood under a Maori king. When the next day the Bishop was allowed to speak to the people, he said: “Here I am a mediator for New Zealand. My word is mediation. I am not merely a Pakeha (Englishman) or a Maori; I am a half-caste. I have eaten your food, I have slept in your houses; I have talked with you, journeyed with you, prayed with you, partaken of the Holy Communion with you. Therefore I say I am a half-caste. I cannot rid myself of my half-caste; it is in my body, in my flesh, in my bones, in my sinews. Yes, we are all of us half-castes. Your dress is half-caste—a Maori mat and English clothes; your strength is half-caste—your courage Maori; your weapons English guns.... Therefore I say we are all half-castes; therefore let us dwell together with one faith, one love, one law.” He proceeded to implore them to allow the Waitara case about the disputed land to be tried by law; and that all together should set right the wrong which had been done by men on both sides. Finally he turned to the whole assembly and said: “O all ye tribes of New Zealand, sitting in council here, I beseech you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in whom we all believe and hope, agree to the proposals by which we shall all live in peace and happiness.” Some were convinced, but the majority refused to give up the lands. It was not long before hostilities began. Sir George Grey came down to investigate the question of the claim to Waitara, but he brought troops with him and the suspicious Maoris felt this meant war. They ambushed a small party of soldiers consisting of two officers and seven men, and killed all but one. Sir George Grey, though in the meanwhile he had discovered that the Maori title to the Waitara was sound, felt that British authority must be vindicated and the murderers punished, so fighting began.
We are not concerned to follow in any detail the course of the war, but only to speak of Bishop Selwyn’s activities during it. Ten thousand troops had gathered in the country and there was not a single chaplain with them. The Bishop therefore joined the army as chaplain. He hoped thus not only to minister to the troops, but to be in a position to protect his native teachers and Christians. He lived in camp, pitched his own tent and shared the life of the soldiers, who admired him for his courage and endurance. An English officer describes how he first saw him. Looking through his telescope he perceived the figure of a man on foot rapidly making his way to the mission station; after a while he came to a small stream, and was observed feeling for its bottom with a long stick; when it proved too deep to be forded he stript, tied his clothes in a bundle on his head and swam across. Selwyn was on his way to warn a native clergyman of the coming of the English soldiers, and to protect him and his school.
During the trying months of war which followed, he did all he could to help both sides, and thus earned the criticism of both colonists and Maoris, they could not understand his position, nor perceive that his one desire was to mitigate the cruel sufferings of war. “If there must be war,” he said, “our great effort ought to be to debrutalise it, and the army from the General downwards, have shown every willingness that it should be so.” He held constant services for the soldiers, attended to the wounded, buried the dead, and fortunately got permission from the War Office to appoint three other chaplains to assist him. During these days he wrote (December 4th, 1863): to his sons in England:
“It is a strange thing to be moving up the Waikato with an army, after twenty years of an annual visit of a peaceful kind. To see the hills crowned with English forts, and steamers smoking on the river, is a strange and to me a painful subject of reflection.”
He sought for wounded men, both Maori and English, in the swamps after an engagement, fearless of stray gunshots. A naval chaplain, who was helping him, was riding with him one day through dense bush, said to be infested with Maoris, when they came to a part of the road cut up with deep ruts on the side of a steep hill. The Bishop jumped from his horse and proceeded to fill up the ruts so as to save the wagons for provisioning the troops from being capsized. Further on, he found an Irish soldier lying drunk and bareheaded, and got down to drag him into shelter saying: “Those men do not know the danger of sunstroke.”
To the misery of watching these scenes of war was added the bitter disappointment of seeing the conduct of the natives. Selwyn wrote to the Bishop of Adelaide:
“I have now one simple missionary idea before me—of watching over the remnant that is left. Our native work is a remnant in two senses, the remnant of a decaying people and the remnant of a decaying faith. The works of which you hear are not the works of heathens; they are the works of baptized men, whose love has grown cold.”
The Maoris could not understand the Bishop’s presence with the English soldiers and looked upon him with suspicion as having gone over to the cause of their enemies, not recognising that he could not leave the troops without some one to minister to their spiritual needs. The English officers soon learnt to love him and to admire his devotion and courage. On a Sunday he would ride many miles, holding seven or eight services in the day. There was a long ridge of about two miles exposed to the fire from the Maoris below which connected two redoubts. The Bishop rode along it at full canter, and the officers used to watch him through their field glasses. They would see a puff of smoke and then the Bishop still galloping along, and say: “It’s all right, they missed him.”