Orakau was abandoned. The Gate Pah had been lost and won. It had also been avenged at Te Ranga, where a hundred and twenty Ngaiterangi warriors lay dead in the trenches, and the 43rd had full utu for the slaughter of their officers and comrades. With few exceptions, all the high chiefs were among the slain. The boastful Rawiri, the chivalrous Te Oriori, the Christian convert Henare Taratoa, had fought their last fight. On the body of the latter was found a letter in the native language, and the text, "If thine enemy hunger, give him food; if he thirst, give him water."
Orakau was the Flodden of the Maori nation. As the fugitives from the blood-stained pah trooped across the fords of the Puniu on the night succeeding the fight, the parallel may well have occurred to Sir Walter Scott's countrymen, so many of whom have adopted New Zealand as their home.
"Tweed's echoes heard the ceaseless splash, While many a broken band, Disordered through her currents dash, To gain the Scottish land."
The war was practically over after the fall of Te Ranga. The turbulent Waikato tribes had lost their high chiefs, their bravest young men. The flower of the land of Maui lay low. The universal wail rose high in a hundred kaingas. Taught by bitter experience, the more intelligent natives had arrived at the conclusion that the resistless pakeha must be obeyed. His soldiers and his sailors, his volunteers and his allies (leading tribes of their own blood), his guns and his mortars, were all too powerful. Their chiefs who had visited England and seen the might of Britain had told them as much before. But, strong in the pride of their own power and the oracles of the Tohungas, they did not believe it. Now it was too plain to be disputed. Defeat was written in the burned and disabled pahs, in the ruined farms, in the confiscated lands of their ancestors, which they had no power to redeem. This, however, was in strict accordance with Maori usage, with the law and custom of Rauparaha, of Hongi Ika, of Te Waharoa, those ruthless conquerors and their ancestors who had ravaged and annexed the lands of tribal foes from time immemorial. Væ Victis was one of the oldest of human laws. It was theirs also. One grim feature of a returning and successful expedition, the train of downcast or weeping slaves, driven along with blows and shouts of derision, was wanting in this campaign. No heads of chiefs or warriors were tossed out or stuck on poles as village after village was passed. No bound captive was handed over to the relations of the fallen for slow and dreadful torture. On the contrary, all the combatants, save those convicted of murder or outrage, were dismissed to their homes, while their wounded were tended in the hospitals of these strangely constituted pakehas with the same care and skilfulness as their own.
At Te Ranga was the last stand made by the Maori for the possession of the lands of his forefathers. No more might he roam whither he would by river and mountain, by lake, shore, or forest stream. The white man's axe rang ceaselessly in his ancient woodlands; the white man's fields, his crops and fences, raised barriers to free untrammelled wanderings from sea to sea. Only in allotted districts, marked out by the white surveyor, would he be permitted to live out his life. Even there, the white man's school, the white man's church, the white man's policeman, would be always with him. In the place of the chief who administered justice and delivered sentence without remonstrance, without appeal, there sat the white man's magistrate, hearing evidence which he did not always understand, fining and imprisoning for offences against laws of which they had neither experience nor comprehension.
This was the state of matters to which the Maori nation had come in the opinion of the older men of the tribes, and not a few of the younger warriors who had never quite given in their adhesion to the rule of the stranger. Haughty and tameless as a race, showing by a thousand instances their preference for death before dishonour, such was their state of feeling at this time, that had there been any other land available, they would probably have trooped away in one great migration like the Moors out of Spain, there to learn to forget their hopes and fears, their triumphs and their despair, far from the snow-crowned ranges, the rushing rivers, the fertile valleys, and fire-breathing mountains of their own loved land.
On the whole, perhaps, it was as well for them, and by no means to the injury of the usurping pakeha, that the ever-girdling sea forbade a national exodus. Stern foe as the Briton has ever been while the fighting lasts, he is the most just and merciful of the world's conquerors. Of the great Roman, when the sandals of his legions trod over the prostrate peoples of the inhabited earth, it is recorded that he permitted them such personal and civic liberty as they had rarely enjoyed under their own rulers. Still, the privilege and boast of uttering the magical words, Civis Romanus sum, had to be paid for largely, as in the Apostle Paul's case. More liberal still, the Briton presents his beaten foe with the priceless gift of his equal laws, his equal suffrage. The ægis is thenceforth held over him, as of a blood-brother and a peer, a citizen of that world-wide empire scarce arrested by the poles, which rules and guards by its laws so large a proportion of the inhabitants of our planet.
While the high contracting parties were settling important points to be observed in the treaty, now necessary after the unconditional surrender made in person by, and signed by, Wirimu Tamehana Te Waharoa, the interests of private persons had their opportunity of consideration. In the ranks of the Forest Rangers doubts were still expressed respecting the fate of one Roland Massinger, reported missing since the affair of the Gate Pah.
Slyde and Warwick were lying in hospital, severely wounded, still too weak to undertake personal search. Warwick, who was near him when he fell, had information to give which, if it accounted for his wounds, was calculated to inspire doubts concerning his safety.