KIMBLE BENT, SAILOR AND SOLDIER
Kimble Bent's early life--An Indian mother--Service in
the American Navy--Departure for England--"Taking the
Shilling"--British Army life--The flight to America--A sinking
ship--Rescue, and landing in Glasgow--Back to the Army
again--Soldiering in India--The 57th ordered to New Zealand--The
Taranaki Campaign--A court-martial--At the triangles.
While the runaway soldier is riding on to the camp of the brown
warriors of the bush--a journey which is to be the beginning of a wild
and savage life leading him for many a day, like Thoreau's Indian
fighter, on dim forest trails "with an uneasy scalp"--there is time to
learn something of his previous history and adventures.
Perhaps the impulse that led to his passionate revolt against
civilisation and rigid army discipline came from his American Indian
blood.
Kimble Bent's mother was a half-caste Red Indian girl, of the Musqua
tribe, whose villages stood on the banks of the St. Croix River, State
of Maine, U.S.A. Her English name before marriage was Eliza Senter.
She became the wife of a shipbuilder in the town of Eastport, Maine;
his name was Waterman Bent; he worked at first for Caleb Houston,
shipbuilder, but afterwards had a yard of his own. This couple had
seven children, two sons and five daughters; one of these sons was
Kimble Bent. He was born in Eastport on August 24, 1837.
The roving wayward element in young Kimble Bent's blood soon made
itself manifest. When he was about seventeen, he ran away from home
and went to sea. He shipped on a United States man-of-war, the
training frigate _Martin_, and spent three years aboard her, cruising
along the Atlantic Coast. He quickly became a smart young sailor and
gunner, and from the rank of seaman he graduated to deckman, a sort
of quartermaster. It was part of his duty during the last year of his
service to instruct the boys who came aboard as recruits in the working
of the muzzle-loading 6-pounder and 8-pounder guns.
Paid off from his frigate at the end of his three years, Bent returned
to his people as unexpectedly as he had left them. But he didn't stay
in Eastport long. The prosaic life of the old town was no more to his
liking than when first he had run away to follow a sailor's life; so
he soon took to the seas again. He gathered together what money he
could--a considerable sum, he says, for his father was indulgent--and
took ship across the Atlantic, in his head some such unexpressed
sentiment as Robert Louis Stevenson long afterwards put into verse in
his "Songs of Travel":
"The untented Kosmos my abode
I go, a wilful stranger,
My mistress still the open road
And the bright eyes of Danger."
But no man-of-war life for him. He booked his passage in a barque
sailing for Liverpool, resolved to see something of life in the Old
World.
When he landed in the big city he "made himself flash," to use his own
expression, and went the pace with a few like-minded young fellows,
and one way and another his stock of cash soon vanished, and he found
himself stranded, friendless, and alone--his companions of the "flush"
times had no more use for him. One day, as he wandered disconsolate
along the streets, his eye was taken by the scarlet tunic and lively
bearing of a smart recruiting-sergeant, and on the impulse of the
moment he took the Queen's shilling and was enlisted in Her Majesty's
57th Regiment of Foot. This was in the year 1859.
The young Eastport sailor soon bitterly regretted the day that his eye
was dazzled by the Queen's scarlet. The British Army was less to his
taste than life in Uncle Sam's Navy. He was sent to Cork with a draft
of two hundred other recruits, and the interminable drill soon gave him
an intense disgust for the routine of barrack-yard instruction. Four
months of recruit-drill--then one day Private Bent took a stroll down
the Cork wharves and cast his eyes round for a likely craft in which to
give the army, drill-sergeants, and all the slip.
A Boston barque, the _Maria_, happened to be lying at one of the tees,
and her skipper, one Captain Cann, Bent, to his joy, found to be an old
acquaintance. He unfolded his dejected tale, and the sailor at once
offered his assistance in rescuing a fellow-countryman from John Bull's
grip. That evening Bent stole away quietly from the barracks, boarded
the barque, and was stowed away safely below in the dunnage-hole. He
did not show his nose above hatches for two days; the barque by that
time had left the harbour on her return voyage to Boston, and the
deserter was able to appear on deck, a free man.
But not for long. Bent's misfortunes were only beginning. When about
three hundred miles off the land a furious easterly gale began to
blow, and the old barkey sprang a leak. Hove-to in the storm, all the
crew could do was to stand to the pumps. The huge Atlantic seas came
thundering on deck, and more than once washed the men away from the
pumps. For six days and six nights they wallowed in the deep, all
hands, sailors and passengers, taking turns at the pumps, working for
their lives.
All those terrible days of storm and fear the _Maria's_ hands had
nothing to eat but hard biscuits soaked with salt water. There was no
place to cook and no means of cooking, for the galley with all its
contents had been washed overboard. While the crew laboured at the
pumps, the captain tried to cheer them up and put a little life into
their weary bodies and despairing hearts by playing lively airs on his
concertina and singing sailors' chanteys.
"One day," says Bent, "a German brig hove in sight and spoke us. Seeing
our signal of distress she asked the name of our barque and the number
of the crew. We signalled our reply, and she answered that she could
not help us, there was too much sea. Then she squared away and left us.
All this time we were labouring at the pumps to keep the old barque
afloat. Next day another brig, a Boston vessel deep-loaded, from the
West Indies, hailed us and stood by, signalling to us to launch our
boats. This we did, after hard and dangerous work, and managed to reach
the brig's side, where all the sixteen of us were hauled on board
safely. About two hours after we left our ship we saw her go down."
To Bent's intense disappointment he found that the brig that had
rescued him was bound for the wrong side of the Atlantic. She landed
the shipwrecked mariners at Glasgow. Bent was walking about the streets
one day, wondering however he was going to get a passage home, for
he had no money, when he was arrested as a deserter--recognised by
the description which had been posted in every barrack-room and every
police-station. He was taken to the military barracks, and then
sent under guard to Ireland and down to Cork, where he was tried by
court-martial, and sentenced to eighty-four days in prison. When he had
served his term he was shipped off to India with his regiment, landing
at Bombay, and for some time did garrison duty at Poona.
The 57th spent two years in India, only just recovering from the
terrible throes of the Mutiny. Then news came of a serious war with
a wild native race in a distant country called New Zealand, far away
down in the Southern Ocean, and the regiment was ordered to hold itself
in readiness to go route-marching to Bombay, thence to sea. Marching
orders soon followed, and the headquarters of the regiment sailed for
Auckland; the company in which Bent was a private (No. 8 Company) was
one of those left behind to look after the women and children of the
regiment. Orders for them also quickly came, and they took the road for
Bombay.
The journey from Poona to Bombay took four days, or rather nights, for
all the marching was done by night. Part of the way was through a dense
jungle in which man-eating tigers swarmed. The troops marched through
this jungle by torchlight, winding along a narrow track through the
densely-matted vegetation. The growling of the tigers was heard all
round at night, but the blazing torches kept them away.
Embarked in a troopship at Bombay, Bent and his fellow-soldiers sailed
not unwillingly for a land spoken of by report as a country which,
though wild and new, was a pleasanter place to live in than scorching
sun-baked India.
After a voyage of eighty-nine days, the troopship anchored in Auckland
Harbour, and her soldiers spent their first week on New Zealand soil
in the old Albert Barracks, where the bright flower-gardens and
tree-groves of a beautiful park now crown the hill that in those
troubled days was girt with a massive crenellated wall, and was alive
with all the martial turmoil of campaigning-time. Then the new arrivals
were sent down to Taranaki by sea to join the headquarters of the 57th,
and went into new barrack life on Marsland Hill, New Plymouth.
Kimble Bent's longing for a free independent life became stronger than
ever in this new country. He would gladly have exchanged camp-life
for even the perilous occupation of a frontier settler, so that he
were free. The parade ground was a purgatory, and the restraint of
discipline and the ramrod-and-pipeclay system of soldiering were
irksome beyond words. He was sick to death of being ordered about by
sergeants and corporals. Fighting would have been a relief, but there
was none yet. He endeavoured to get his discharge from the regiment,
but without success; and his impatience of discipline led him into
various more or less serious conflicts with the regimental authorities.
* * * * *
So opened Kimble Bent's life in the new land, the land in which he was
to roam the forests an outlaw for more than a decade.
In those war-days of 1860-70 dense forests covered the wide plains
of this Taranaki province, where now most of the dark old woods have
been hewn away, and have given place to the pastures and homesteads
of dairy farmers. It was a wild but beautiful land. The coast curved
out and round in a great sweeping semicircle from Waitara in the north
to Wanganui in the south; the intervening region of forest, hill,
and plain was the theatre of war. High and central, Taranaki's great
mountain-cone, which the _pakeha_ calls Egmont, swelled to a height
of over 8,000 feet, its base hidden in the forests, its snowy peak
glittering far above the broad soft swathes of clouds, the sailor's
landmark a hundred miles out at sea. Remote from all other high
mountains it soared aloft--"lonely as God and white as a winter morn,"
as Joaquin Miller wrote of his beloved Mount Shasta. On all sides
Taranaki--the holy mountain of the Maoris--sloped evenly and gently
to the plains, and from its recesses sprang the head waters of many
a beautiful river. The mountain, huge yet exquisitely symmetrical,
was revered by the old-school Taranaki Maori as the mighty symbol of
his nationality, and regarded as being in some mystic fashion the
source of his tribal _mana_. Under the shadow of Taranaki began the
Ten Years' War; here the Hauhau fanaticism took its mad rise in 1864.
From Taranaki's foot set out the Hauhau apostles, preaching a strange
jumble of Scriptural expressions and pagan Maori concepts, promising
their converts that no _pakeha_ bullet should harm them if they but
repeated their magic incantations; and brandishing before the ranks of
their devotees the dried and smoked heads of slain white soldiers.
The relapse into barbarism was more marked in Taranaki than anywhere
else, and even to this day the hatred of the white man lingers there,
amongst the remnants of the old Hauhau stock. Te Whiti, the Prophet
of Parihaka, until his death in 1907, held his court under the shadow
of lofty Taranaki, and preached his old mysticism fortified by the
towering presence of his mountain-god, cold and immutable, and all
unmindful of the _pakeha's_ march through the plains below.
[Illustration: MOUNT EGMONT, TARANAKI.]
* * * * *
In March, 1864, the 57th were ordered from New Plymouth to Manawapou
(not far from the present town of Hawera), near the Tangahoé River.
The fanatic Hauhau faith had just been born amongst the Maoris, whose
palisaded _pas_ dotted the outskirts of the great forests on the
farther side of the Tangahoé, and whose war-songs could sometimes be
heard from the white soldiers' camp. At Manawapou the regiment went
under canvas, and now began the regular round of sentry-go and outpost
duty, and all the preparations for an advance on the rebel positions.
[Illustration: A TARANAKI FRONTIER FORT.
(_Sketch by Mr. S. Percy Smith, 1865._)]
Meantime there was fighting in the northern and western parts of the
Taranaki province, between the 57th camp and New Plymouth. There was
the disastrous affair at Te Ahuahu, where Captain Lloyd and several
soldiers were killed; their heads were cut off and smoke-dried by the
Hauhau savages, and were carried away to distant tribes by Kereopa,
Patara, and other rebel emissaries, the Hauhau recruiting officers.
Another momentous affair which happened soon after the 57th took post
at Manawapou was the desperate assault on the British redoubt at Sentry
Hill (Te Morere). A large force of Hauhau warriors, deluded by their
prophet Hepanaia into believing that his incantations rendered them
invulnerable to the white man's bullets, rushed against the redoubt
in open daylight one morning, but were beaten off, leaving some fifty
of their number lying dead in front of the fort. It was in this
engagement that Titokowaru--who was afterwards Kimble Bent's chief and
master--lost one of his eyes through a bullet wound.
* * * * *
Kimble Bent's final revolt against constituted authority came one wet,
cold day in the Manawapou camp in April 1864. It was pouring with rain,
but a corporal, one who took a vindictive sort of pleasure in asserting
his authority over those privates whom he happened to dislike, ordered
Bent to go out and cut some firewood in the bush. Irritated by the
manner in which the order was given, the young "Down-Easter" was
foolish enough to argue with his enemy the corporal.
"Look here," he said, "this is no day to send a man out cutting wood.
The officers can stay in their tents laughing at us fellows out in the
rain. We're treated like a set of blessed dogs."
"Oh, you won't go, won't you?" sneered the corporal, rejoicing at
having irritated the soldier into insubordination.
"No, I won't go," said Bent defiantly; "so you can do what you like
about it."
The corporal reported Bent to his immediate superiors, and the soldier
was arrested and lodged in the guard-tent. Next morning he was brought
before a court-martial and tried for disobedience of orders. Major
Haszard was the president of the court. With him sat Captain Clark,
Lieutenant Brown, and Ensign Parker. Bent knew it was useless to
attempt a defence, for his offence was an inexcusable breach of
discipline. He was found guilty, and the sentence of the court was that
he should receive fifty lashes, and serve two years in gaol.
The triangles were then a familiar institution in every military camp
in the Waikato and in Taranaki; for those were flogging days, when
even slight breaches of military rules brought down the lash upon the
soldier's back.
One of the regimental surgeons, Dr. Andrews, examined Bent, as was the
practice before flogging was inflicted, and he reported that in his
opinion the young soldier was not constitutionally fit to endure the
fifty lashes ordered.
Soon after Bent had been taken to his tent under guard, one of the
officers of the court-martial came in to see him. This was Captain
Clark, a fine jovial young Canadian-born soldier, who had rather a
liking for the unfortunate man from his end of the world.
"Cheer up, Bent," he said; "you'll only get twenty-five--the sentence
is reduced. And put that in your mouth when you go to the triangles,"
and he threw down a sixpence. Then, when the guard-tent corporal
was not looking, the kindly officer took a flask of rum from his
breast-pocket, laid it on the tent floor, and walked away to his
quarters.
When Bent was called out for punishment, he quickly drank off the rum,
and put the sixpence in his mouth. He knew the old soldier's recipe for
a "stiff upper lip" in the agony of flogging--"bite on the bullet." The
sixpence would serve him as well. It would keep his teeth from biting
through his tongue in the throes of that horrible punishment.
A bugle sounded the "Fall in." No. 8 Company was paraded in review
order on the drill ground to "witness punishment." Bent was marched
down to the square; he was stripped to the waist and tied to the
triangles. The big drummer of the Company stepped to the front; he was
the flagellant. Bent bit on his substitute for a bullet as the cat
swished through the air and fell like a red-hot knife on his quivering
back. Again and again came the frightful cuts, criss-cross upon his
back and shoulders, till the tale of twenty-five was complete. Then
the prisoner was cast loose, swearing in his pain and passion to have
the drummer's life. A blanket was thrown across his raw and bleeding
shoulders, and he was marched back to the guard-tent, where the surgeon
prescribed for him in rough-and-ready fashion; then to prison--he
refused to go into the camp hospital.
Bent served some months in Wellington Prison, doing cook-house work, in
expiation of his offence against military discipline. Then he was sent
back to his hated regiment. The shame of that morning at the triangles,
with his comrades paraded to witness his disgrace and agony, was burned
into him for ever. He grew morose and desperate. At last he resolved
to desert to the enemy. He confided his resolve to his tent-mates, and
they, knowing that other soldiers had deserted to the Maoris and had
not been killed, did not attempt to dissuade him. "I can't be worse off
with the Maoris than I am here," he told them; "if they do tomahawk me,
it will end all my troubles. I don't very much care."
So he bided his time for a favourable opportunity to steal from the
camp; and soon his chance came. It was on June 12, 1865, that he broke
camp and fell in with the Hauhau scout on the banks of the Tangahoé.