Loaded with booty, Heké's men went off inland in high spirits. Three vessels crowded with the ruined Alsatians sailed to Auckland, where for a while the astonished people expected nightly to be roused from their beds by the yells of Ngapuhi warriors. Our loss had been thirty-one killed and wounded, and it was small consolation to know that, thanks to the ship's guns, the Maoris' had been three times as great. The disaster was a greater blow to the English Mana than even the Wairau Massacre. But the settlements showed spirit everywhere, and under the stress of the time the Governor forgot some of his prejudices. Even those much-suspected people, the Wellington settlers, were allowed to form themselves into a militia at last.
Thanks to the divisions among the Ngapuhi, Heké did not follow up his victory. Troops were procured from Sydney, but they had no artillery. The natives relied on their pas or stockades. These, skilfully constructed by means of double or triple rows of heavy palisades, masked by flax and divided by shallow ditches which did duty for rifle-pits, could not be carried without being breached by cannon. A fruitless attack upon one of them soon demonstrated this. The pa, called Okaihau, though strong in front, was weak in the rear. Four hundred soldiers, supported by as many Ngapuhi friendlies under Waka Nené, marched against it. Fruitlessly Nené advised the English Colonel to assail the place from behind. The Colonel, who had seen Nené yelling in a war-dance, and looked upon him as a degraded savage, approached the front, where Okaihau was really strong. As he had no guns he tried the effect of rockets, but though terrified by the strange fire, the defenders gained heart when they found that the rockets hit nothing. They even charged the English in the open with long-handled tomahawks, and only fell back before a bayonet charge in regular form. After skirmishing all day and losing fifty-four in killed and wounded with but negative results, the English retreated to Auckland to request artillery. Waka Nené carried on the fighting on his own account, and in a skirmish with him Heké was badly wounded. Guns were fetched from Australia, and Heké's men were brought to bay at their principal pa, Ohaeawai. Colonel Despard commanded the besiegers, who outnumbered the defenders by more than three to one. After bombarding the palisades for some days, the colonel, in defiance of the advice of his artillery officer—who declared there was no practicable breach—ordered an assault. Two hundred soldiers and sailors were told off for the duty, and at four o'clock on a pleasant, sunny afternoon they charged up a gentle, open slope to the simple-looking stockade. Only two or three got inside. In a quarter of an hour half the force were shot down, and the survivors only saved by the bugle-call which Despard ordered to be sounded. Forty, including a captain and two lieutenants, were killed on the spot or died of their wounds. Sixty-two others were wounded. Gallant Lieutenant Philpotts, the first through the stockade, lay dead, sword in hand, inside the pa. At the outset of the war he had been captured by the natives whilst scouting, and let go unharmed with advice to take more care in future. Through no fault of his own he had lost Kororáreka. Stung by this, or, as some say, by a taunt of Despard's, he led the way at Ohaeawai with utterly reckless courage, and, to the regret of the brave brown men his enemies, was shot at close quarters by a mere boy. The wounded could not be removed for two days. During the night the triumphant Maoris shouted and danced their war-dance. They tortured—with burning kauri gum—an unfortunate soldier whom they had captured alive, and whose screams could be plainly heard in the English camp. Despard, whose artillery ammunition had run short, remained watching the pa for several days. But when he was in a position to renew his bombardment, the natives quietly abandoned the place by night, without loss. According to their notions of warfare, such a withdrawal was not a defeat.
Such are the facts of one of the worst repulses sustained by our arms in New Zealand. It will scarcely be believed that after this humiliation Captain Fitzroy, on missionary advice, endeavoured to make peace—of course, without avail. Heké became a hero in the eyes of his race. The news of Ohaeawai reached England, and the Duke of Wellington's language about Colonel Despard is said to have been pointed. But already the Colonial Office had made up its mind for a change in New Zealand. Fitzroy was recalled, and Captain Grey, the Governor of South Australia, whose sense and determination had lifted that Colony out of the mire, was wisely selected to replace him.
Chapter XII
GOOD GOVERNOR GREY
"No hasty fool of stubborn will,
But prudent, wary, pliant still,
Who, since his work was good,
Would do it as he could."
Captain Grey came in the nick of time. That he managed because he wasted no time about coming. The despatch, removing him from South Australia to New Zealand, reached Adelaide on the 15th of October, 1845, and by the 14th of November he was in Auckland.
He arrived to find Kororáreka in ashes, Auckland anxious, the Company's settlers in the south harassed by the Maoris and embittered against the Government, the missionaries objects of tormenting suspicions, and the natives unbeaten and exultant. The Colonists had no money and no hope. Four hundred Crown grants were lying unissued in the Auckland Land Office because land-buyers could not pay the fee of £1 apiece due on them.
But the Colonial Office, now that it at last gave unfortunate New Zealand a capable head, did not do things by halves. It supplied him with sufficient troops and a certain amount of money. The strong hand at the helm at once made itself felt. Within a month the circulating debentures were withdrawn, the pre-emptive right of the Crown over native lands resumed, the sale of fire-arms to natives prohibited, and negotiations with Heké and his fellow insurgent chief, Kawiti, sternly broken off.
The Governor set to work to end the war. High in air, on the side of a thickly-timbered hill, lay Kawiti's new and strongest pa, Rua-peka-peka (the Bat's Nest). Curtained by a double palisade of beams eighteen feet high by two feet thick, strengthened by flanking redoubts, ditches, and traverses, honeycombed with rifle-pits and bomb-proof chambers below ground, "large enough to hold a whist-party," it was a model Maori fortification of the later style.