But the main interest soon shifted from Taranaki. In the Waikato, relations with the King's tribes were drifting from bad to worse. Grey had been called in too late. His mana was no longer the influence it had been ten years before. His diplomatic advances and offers of local government were met with sheer sulkiness. The semi-comic incident of Sir John Gorst's newspaper skirmish at Te Awamutu did no good. Gorst was stationed there as Commissioner by the Government, as an agent of peace and conciliation. In his charge was an industrial school. It was in the heart of the King Country. The King's advisers must needs have an organ—a broad-sheet called the Hokioi, a word which may be paraphrased by Phoenix. With unquestionable courage, Gorst, acting on Grey's orders, issued a sheet in opposition, entitled Te Pihoihoi Mokémoké, or The Lonely Lark. Fierce was the encounter of the rival birds. The Lark out-argued the Phoenix. But the truculent Kingites had their own way of dealing with lèse majesté. They descended on the printing-house, and carried off the press and type of Te Pihoihoi Mokémoké. The press they afterwards sent back to Auckland; of the type, it is said, they ultimately made bullets. Gorst, ordered to quit the King Country, refused to budge without instructions. The Maoris gave him three weeks to get them and depart, and very luckily for him Grey sent them.
The Governor pushed on a military road from Auckland to the Waikato frontier—a doubtful piece of policy, as it irritated the natives, and the Waikato country, as experience afterwards showed, could be best invaded with the help of river steamers. The steamers were, however, not procured at that stage. About the same time as the Gorst incident in the Upper Waikato, the Government tried to build a police-station and barracks on a plot of land belonging to a friendly native lower down the river. The King natives, however, forbade the erection, and, when the work went on, a party of them paddled down, seized the materials and threw them into the stream.
It was now clear that war was coming. The utmost anxiety prevailed in Auckland, which was only forty miles from the frontier and exposed to attack both from sea and land. Moreover, some hundreds of natives, living quite close to the town, had arms, and were ascertained to be in communication with the Waikatos. The Governor attempted to disarm them, but the plan was not well carried out, and most of them escaped with their weapons to the King Country. The choice of the Government then lay between attacking and being attacked. They learned, beyond a doubt, that the Waikatos were planning a march on Auckland, and in a letter written by Thompson about this time he not only stated this, but said that in the event of an assault the unarmed people would not be spared. By the middle of the year 1863, however, a strong force was concentrated on the border, just where the Waikato River, turning from its long northward course, abruptly bends westward towards the sea. No less than twelve Imperial Regiments were now in New Zealand, and their commander, General Sir Duncan Cameron, a Crimean veteran, gained a success of some note in Taranaki. He was a brave, methodical soldier, destitute of originality, nimbleness or knowledge of the country or of savage warfare. In July, the invasion of the Waikato was ordered. On the very day before our men advanced, the Maoris had begun what they meant to be their march to Auckland, and the two forces at once came into collision. In a sharp fight at Koheroa the natives were driven from their entrenchments with some loss, and any forward movement on their part was effectually stopped. But, thanks to what seemed to the colonists infuriating slowness, the advance up the Waikato was not begun until the latter part of October, and the conquest of the country not completed until February.
To understand the cause of this impatience on the part of the onlookers, it should be mentioned that our forces were now, as usual in the Maori wars, altogether overwhelming. The highest estimate of the fighting men of the King tribes is two thousand. As against this, General Cameron had ultimately rather more than ten thousand Imperial troops in the Colony to draw upon. In addition to that, the colonial militia and volunteers were gradually recruited until they numbered nearly as many. About half of these were, at any rate after a short time, quite as effectual as the regulars for the peculiar guerilla war which was being waged. In armament there was no comparison between the two sides. The Pakeha had Enfield rifles and a good supply of artillery. The Maoris were armed with old Tower muskets and shot-guns, and were badly off both for powder and bullets, while, as already said, they were not very good marksmen. Their artillery consisted of two or three old ship's guns, from which salutes might have been fired without extreme danger to their gunners. If the war in the Waikato, and its off-shoot the fighting in the Bay of Plenty, had been in thick forest and a mountainous country, the disparity of numbers and equipment might have been counterbalanced. But the Waikato country was flat or undulating, clothed in fern and with only patches of forest. A first-class high road—the river—ran right through it. The sturdy resistance of the natives was due first to their splendid courage and skilful use of rifle-pits and earthworks, and in the second place to our want of dash and tactical resource. Clever as the Maori engineers were, bravely as the brown warriors defended their entrenchments, their positions ought to have been nothing more than traps for them, seeing how overwhelming was the white force. The explanation of this lies in the Maori habit of taking up their positions without either provisions or water. A greatly superior enemy, therefore, had only to surround them. They then, in the course of two or three days at the outside, had either to surrender at discretion or try the desperate course of breaking through the hostile lines.
General Cameron preferred the more slap-dash course of taking entrenchments by assault. A stubborn fight took place at Rangiriri, where the Maoris made a stand on a neck of land between the lake and the Waikato River. Assaulted on two sides, they were quickly driven from all their pits and earthworks except one large central redoubt. Three times our men were sent at this, and three times, despite a fine display of courage, they were flung back with loss. The bravest soldier cannot—without wings—surmount a bank which rises eighteen feet sheer from the bottom of a broad ditch. This was seen next day. The attack ceased at nightfall. During the dark hours the redoubt's defenders yelled defiance, but next morning they surrendered, and, marching out, a hundred and eighty-three laid down their arms. Our loss was one hundred and thirty-two killed and wounded; the Maori loss was fifty killed, wounded unknown. By January, General Cameron had passed beyond Ngaruawahia, the village which had been the Maori King's head-quarters, and which stood at the fine river-junction where the brown, sluggish Waipa loses its name and waters in the light-green volume of the swifter Waikato. Twice the English beat the enemy in the triangle between the rivers. A third encounter was signalised by the most heroic incident in the Colony's history. Some three hundred Maoris were shut up in entrenchments at a place called Orakau. Without food, except a few raw potatoes; without water; pounded at by our artillery, and under a hail of rifle bullets and hand grenades; unsuccessfully assaulted no less than five times—they held out for three days, though completely surrounded. General Cameron humanely sent a flag of truce inviting them to surrender honourably. To this they made the ever-famous reply, "Enough! We fight right on, for ever!" (Heoi ano! Ka whawhai tonu, aké, aké, aké.) Then the General offered to let the women come out, and the answer was, "The women will fight as well as we." At length, on the afternoon of the third day, the garrison assembling in a body charged at quick march right through the English lines, fairly jumping (according to one account) over the heads of the men of the Fortieth Regiment as they lay behind a bank. So unexpected and amazing was their charge, that they would have got away with but slight loss had they not, when outside the lines, been headed and confronted by a force of colonial rangers and cavalry. Half of them fell; the remainder, including the celebrated war-chief Rewi, got clear away. The earthworks and the victory remained with us, but the glory of the engagement lay with those whose message of "Aké, aké, aké," will never be forgotten in New Zealand.
The country round the middle and lower Waikato was now in our hands, and the King natives were driven to the country about its upper waters. They were not followed. It was decided to attack the Tauranga tribe, which had been aiding them. Tauranga lies on the Bay of Plenty, about forty miles to the east of the Waikato. It was in the campaign which now took place there that there occurred the noted repulse at the Gate Pa. The Maoris, entrenched on a narrow neck of land between two swamps, were invested by our forces both in the front and rear We were, as usual, immensely the stronger in numbers. Our officers, non-commissioned officers and drummers by themselves almost equalled the garrison. After a heavy though not always very accurate bombardment, General Cameron decided to storm the works. The attacking parties of soldiers and sailors charged well enough and entered the front of the defences, and the Maoris, hopeless and endeavouring to escape, found themselves shut in by the troops in their rear. Turning, however, with the courage of despair, they flung themselves on the assailants of their front. These, seized with an extraordinary panic, ran in confusion, breaking from their officers and sweeping away their supports. The assault was completely repulsed, and was not renewed. In the night the defenders escaped through the swamps, leaving us the empty pa. Their loss was slight. Ours was one hundred and eleven, and amongst the killed were ten good officers. As a defeat it was worse than Ohaeawai, for that had been solely due to a commander's error of judgment.
The blow stung the English officers and men deeply, and they speedily avenged it. Hearing that the Tauranga warriors were entrenching themselves at Te Rangi, Colonel Greer promptly marched thither, caught them before they had completed their works, and charging into the rifle-pits with the bayonet, completely routed the Maoris. The temper of the attacking force may be judged from the fact that out of the Maori loss of one hundred and forty-five no less than one hundred and twenty-three were killed or died of wounds. The blow was decisive, and the Tauranga tribe at once submitted.
