So died Hongi Ika, aged fifty-five, or thereabouts, who had made his influence felt from his youth until his death, and whose words and acts deeply swayed the fortunes of his country. Paradoxical as it may sound, these combined with the spread of Christianity to render colonisation possible, while they helped to foment the discontent with which Hongi's successors viewed the coming of armed forces, and the gradual absorption of their land by the Pakeha.
In the first place, Hongi protected the missionaries. In the second place, during his wars and the wars they induced, more than twenty thousand Maori fell in the score of years occupied in civil strife. Concerned with their own wars, and with numbers thinned, the Maori left the white settlers time and opportunity to increase, whereby they grew daily better able to resist the power of the brown men when this was at last sternly directed against them. In the third place, Hongi's dying advice was without the shadow of a doubt the part cause of Honi Heke's outbreak at Kororareka fifteen years later, and of the strife which immediately followed it.
After the death of Hongi the leading spirits among the warriors in the neighbourhood of the Bay of Islands were the chiefs Pomare and Kawiti—the latter a thorn in the colonials' flesh for many a long year; while the Waikato tribe boasted a leader of no ordinary parts in Te Wherowhero, whose descendant, the Honourable Mahuta Tawhiao Potatau te Wherowhero, sits to-day in the Legislative Council of the Dominion of New Zealand.
Te Wherowhero had himself captained the Waikato on that day when Hongi decimated them and cooked two thousand of their slain to celebrate his victory, and a memory so red would not, one would have said, be likely soon to pale. Yet Te Wherowhero led his men not against his old enemies, but against the men of Taranaki.
Both Waikato and Taranaki owed Nga-Puhi a grudge, and reasonable men would have combined against a common foe. But the Maori were ever unreasonable where war was concerned, holding tribal grudges more important than unification of the nation; so, instead of combining against Nga-Puhi, Waikato and Taranaki warred the one against the other.
This disunion among the tribes materially assisted the colonists in their own long struggle for supremacy; for the "friendly" Maori often helped their cause not so much from love of them, as from hate of some tribe in opposition to British rule.
Even a particular tribe sometimes divided against itself. A civil strife of this nature broke out in 1827 among the Bay of Islands folk. It was a small affair, and is mentioned only to illustrate the chivalry with which the Maori could behave on occasion.
A European settlement had been established at a charming spot, known as Kororareka. There were decent people there, and a missionary station stood hard by; but for the most part drunkenness and profligacy prevailed, while Pomare, whose village lay close at hand, pandered to the vices of the whites in return for the coveted tupara.
Bad as many of the settlers were, they were white men; so when news of the war reached Sydney, Captain Hobson's ship was ordered to Kororareka to afford the residents what protection they might require.
But when H.M.S. Rattlesnake entered the Bay, her decks cleared for action, guns frowning through their ports, bare-armed, bare-footed tars at quarters, lo! all was peace. Captain Hobson at once went ashore to make inquiries, and was amazed at the information he received.