BUSH LIFE WITH THE HAUHAUS
Wild days in the forest--The Hauhau hunters--Maori
wood-craft--Bird-snaring and bird-spearing--The fowlers at Te
Ngaere--The slayer of Broughton--Another runaway soldier, and his
fate--The tomahawking of Humphrey Murphy.
For some weeks the fugitives remained in their well-hidden camp by the
Tangahoé's stream. When the wounded were able to travel, "Ringiringi"
and his Maori companions took them a few miles through the bush to a
place called Rimatoto, the overgrown site of an olden village. All the
able-bodied men of the tribe now set to work to build a new settlement.
Thatched _nikau_-palm houses were quickly run up, and the forest rang
day after day with the axes of the bush-fellers, clearing the ground
for potato-planting.
As it was intended to make this a permanent _kainga_--always providing
Kepa's dusky forest-rangers did not find their way to it in their
scouting expeditions--a large clearing was made. The felled trees
were allowed to lie for about three months until they were dry enough
to be fired; then the potatoes were set in amongst the half-burned
stumps and logs. In the meantime the forest was scoured for food, and
foraging parties were sent out to Turangaréré and other villages on
the outskirts of the forest and returned laden with pork and potatoes,
strapped across their shoulders in the usual Maori _pikau_ fashion.
Four miles away by a rough bush track, a track hardly discernible to
any but a Maori, was the Maha village. There the white man was taken by
his _rangatira_ Tito, after the bush-felling work was over, and three
or four peaceful months were passed, varied only by occasional armed
scouting expeditions to the forest edge, and by long fishing, birding,
and pig-hunting trips into the great wilderness of jungle-matted timber
that hemmed in the lonely village on every side.
Bent had now been a year with the Maoris, and had thoroughly settled
into the native life. He had quickly picked up the language of his
adopted people, and there was nothing of the _pakeha_ about him but the
colour of his skin, and that was browning with constant exposure and
outdoor labour. A waist-shawl or a flax kilt was his single article
of everyday clothing; in cold weather a shoulder-mat or a blanket
was added. In this village of the woods there were few emblems of
civilisation except the weapons of the warriors. Stories of battle and
skirmish now and again reached the bushmen by messengers from the
plains; and the white general's great march through the forest from
Ketemarae by the Whakaahurangi track around the eastern side of Mount
Egmont to Mataitawa and New Plymouth--when the soldiers fell so short
of food that they had to shoot and eat their pack-horses--was discussed
many a night in the village _wharepuni_, the communal council-room and
sleeping-house.
Bent's half-Indian temperament soon adapted itself to this wild life
in the forest. No drill day after day, no parades, no sentry-go, no
buttons to polish, and no uniform to mend--surely this savage life
had its compensations. When the Maoris had urgent and laborious
work on hand they worked like fury, and compelled--with the spur
of a tomahawk--the white man to toil with equal industry, if not
willingness. Fort-building, trench-digging and timber-felling were
undertakings in which the whole strength of the community laboured from
dawn till dark, and the chiefs as hard as the common men and slaves.
It was warrior's work. But there were periods of halcyon, lazy days
in Maoridom, when "Ringiringi" and his ragged comrades of the bush,
their work over, could just "lie around" and smoke and eat, and take
no thought for the morrow so long as they could procure a pipe-full of
strong _torori_ (tobacco) and a square meal of potatoes and pork. Tito
proved a not unkind master, when he found that his white man neither
attempted to escape from the tribe nor shirked the often heavy tasks
imposed upon him.
[Illustration: A BRITISH COLUMN ON THE MARCH.
(_From a water-colour sketch by Major Von Tempsky, 1866._)]
The _paheka_ soon became an adept in the wood-craft of the Maoris. He
accompanied the young men of the tribe on their forest expeditions,
bird-snaring and bird-spearing; these camping-out trips sometimes
lasted for a week or more. Far into the solitudes of the great woods
the little hunting-parties penetrated, always armed, for they never
knew when or where the Government Maori scouts might be encountered.
The days were spent in birding and pig-hunting, and the long nights
by the blazing camp-fire, when the white man learned from his Hauhau
comrades many a wild legend and folk-story, hair-raising tales of
witchcraft, and mournful _tangi_-songs and love-ditties without end.
Powder and shot were too valuable to waste on the birds of the forest
in those days. One of the Maori snaring methods, as practised by
"Ringiringi" and his companions, was to cut out wooden _waka_, or
miniature canoes or troughs, fill them with water, and place them in
some dry spot in the forest where pigeons and _tui_ were plentiful.
Just over these troughs flax-snares were arranged, so that when the
birds, thirsting for water after feasting on the bush-berries, flew
down to drink, and stretched their heads through the running loops,
they were tightly noosed. Other snares were set on the _miro_-trees,
of whose sweet berries the pigeons and _tui_ were particularly fond.
"Ringiringi" quickly learned the art of setting snares of flax or
cabbage-tree leaf with cunning slip-loops in the branches of the
fruit-laden _miro_; in a clump of these pines he sometimes caught in
a single day as many as three hundred or four hundred birds--_kaka_
parrots, _tui_, and pigeon--for the forests were alive with feathered
creatures, and in the autumn time, when the wild fruits were ripe and
abundant, they were to be taken with little trouble; the noisy _kaka_
parrot was the most easily lured of all. The only forest bird that
was not welcomed by the hunters was the owl, or _ruru_; should one
happen to be killed it was never eaten, because in Maori eyes it was an
_atua_, a spirit or the incarnation of a tribal deity.
Bird-spearing was another forest art widely practised in those times.
Long slender limber spears of _tawa_ wood, twelve feet long and more,
were used.
In making the bird-spears, the pole from which each was cut was
scorched with fire till very dry, then it was scraped and scraped
down with _pawa_-shells and scorched again, and once more scraped and
shaped with great care and industry, until it had been reduced to the
size desired and was perfectly smooth. These spears were armed with
barbed tips, often of bone, sometimes of iron. The villagers trailed
the weapons after them as they travelled through the forest, until
they came to some tree where _tui_ and pigeon perched in numbers; then
the spear was slowly and cautiously pushed upwards until close to the
unsuspecting bird, and a sudden, sharp thrust impaled it on the barbed
point.
The _pakeha_ was carefully schooled in the art of using the spear, and
was enjoined, above all, never to strike the pigeon full in the breast,
because the bone would often snap the barb-tip off; it must be speared
in the side. In the late autumn the pigeons were "rolling fat"; and
many hundreds of them were preserved or potted in Maori fashion by the
birding-parties in _taha_, or calabashes (the _hué_ gourd), which were
hermetically sealed with the fat of the cooked birds.
One foraging expedition which Bent accompanied was farther afield than
usual, up northwards to the great Ngaere swamp, a huge morass near
where the present township of Eltham stands, and where dairy cattle now
graze on fields that in those days of '66 were seemingly irreclaimable
bogs and wildernesses; lagoons, where millions of eels crawled,
snake-like, in the ooze, and where countless thousands of wild fowl and
water-birds fished and screamed and squabbled all day long. To the edge
of the great swamp came the food-hunters; they waded across to the two
islets which rose from the middle of the bog--ancient refuge-places
of fugitive tribes--and camped there, catching and smoke-drying huge
quantities of eels for winter food in the home _kainga_, and snaring
many ducks and other birds. In this primeval spot the beautiful
_kotuku_, the white heron so famous in Maori song and proverb--now
never seen in the North Island--then abounded; the white man often
admired this graceful bird as he stood on silent watch on the marge of
some sedgy pool, then, like lightning-flash, darted his long spear-bill
on his prey. The birds were tame, and easily caught, and many were
snared and eaten by the foragers. "Ringiringi" captured some on the
shores of the lagoon by the simple expedient of a bent supplejack and
an arrangement of flax loops, set near the _kotuku's_ daily haunts;
a day seldom passed without a heron being found flapping and choking
tightly noosed in the snares of the fowlers.
One day in the spring of 1866, when Tito and his _hapu_, their
bird-hunting expeditions over for the season, were gathered in their
bush-village Rimatoto, three strange Maoris, fully armed, entered the
settlement. They had travelled overland from the King Country, far to
the north, on a mission from Tawhiao, the Waikato King, who, after
the conquest of the Waikato Valley by the white troops, had taken
refuge with the Ngati-Maniapoto tribe. The envoys had been sent down
to recover some Waikato war-flags which were in the possession of the
Taranaki Hauhaus.
In the crowded _wharepuni_ that night, when the Waikato warriors made
their errand known, one of them caught sight of the white man, sitting
silently in his corner, and asked who he was. When Tito explained, the
visitor asked,
"Why don't you kill him?"
"He is my _pakeha_," said Tito, "and I will protect him, because our
prophet Te Ua has _tapu_'d him, and ordered us not to harm him."
"That is indeed a soft and foolish way to deal with _pakehas_"
exclaimed a fierce-looking young warrior, one of the Waikato trio. "We
don't take any white prisoners in our country. You ought to have his
head stuck on the fence of your _pa_."
Tito laughed. "Ringiringi is going to be useful to us," he said.
"Besides, he is a Maori now."
Next morning Tito despatched the white man and an old Maori named Te
Waka-tapa-ruru through the forest to Te Putahi, a stockaded village
some ten miles away, on the banks of the Whenuakura River, with a
message to the people of that _pa_ requesting them to return the
colours for which the king had sent. This mission accomplished, Bent
stayed a while in Te Putahi, where he was treated with much kindness,
because of his association with Tito.
On the morning after his arrival a man came to his sleeping-hut and,
without saying a word, placed on the mat before him a couple of
blankets and a watch.
The history of the watch was afterwards explained to him by Te
Waka-tapa-ruru. This warrior was a typical old bush-fighter. He had
a very big head; he was tattooed on the cheeks; he was wiry and
wonderfully quick on his legs. He told Bent, with a devilish grin on
his corrugated face, that the watch had belonged to a white man, called
Paratene, whom he--Te Waka--had shot the previous year at Otoia, on the
Patea River. This _pakeha_ was Mr. C. Broughton, a native interpreter
who had been sent on a special Government mission to the Hauhaus, and
was barbarously murdered while in the act of lighting his pipe in the
village _marae_.
Broughton's slayer, despite his repulsive antecedents, became a friend
of Bent's, and they were close comrades until 1869, when the old man
was killed in the act of charging furiously on the Armed Constabulary
at the attack on the Papa-tihakehake stockade.
At Te Putahi "Ringiringi" was astonished to find another white man,
clothed like himself in a blanket. This man walked up and greeted
him, and the _pakeha_-Maori recognised the long-haired, rough-bearded
fellow as an old fellow-soldier. His name was Humphrey Murphy; he, too,
had been a private in the 57th, and had become as dissatisfied with
the life as Bent had done, and deserted to the Hauhaus. Bent sums him
up as "a bad lot." Murphy was an evil-tempered Irishman, faithful to
neither white man nor Maori. He belonged to two chiefs, Te Onekura and
Wharé-matangi, who lived in the _pa_ at Te Putahi.
Murphy, it appeared from his own story, had been taken over as a
_taurekareka_, a slave, by one of the Hauhau chiefs when he deserted,
and had been sent as a food-carrier to Te Putahi by his owner, who
treated his "white trash" with scant consideration. At Te Putahi he had
been taken over by the two local chiefs. The deserter bragged to Bent,
as they sat side by side on the village _marae_, that he would shortly
return to his old Maori "boss," as he called him, and kill him, and
take what money he could find as payment for his enforced labour.
While Murphy was speaking, a young Maori girl sat by quietly listening.
When the runaway soldier rose and walked off to his hut, the girl said:
"Ringi, I heard what that _taurekareka_ white man was saying. I have
learned enough of the _pakeha's_ tongue to know that he is going to
kill his _rangatira_ and steal his money."
"_Kaati!_ Don't say a word about it," cautioned Bent.
But the girl rose up in the meeting-house one night after "Ringiringi"
had departed to his home at Rimatoto, and repeated the threat she had
overheard from Murphy's lips.
That settled the _taurekareka's_ fate. Bent, some time later, inquiring
after Murphy from one of Tito's men who had been on a visit to Te
Putahi, was told that he had been killed. The Hauhaus had a short way
with such as he. He was quietly tomahawked one night as he lay asleep,
and his despised remains dragged out and cast into the Whenuakura River
that ran below the village.
At this time there were at least four white men living with the
Hauhaus in South Taranaki. One came to Rimatoto to see "Ringiringi,"
and remained with him for a week. His name was Jack Hennessy, and he
had, like Bent, deserted from the 57th Regiment. He was in fact the
"shut-eye sentry" who had seen Bent steal off from the Manawapou camp
in 1865. He gave himself up to the white forces some time later, tired
of life with the Hauhaus, and was court-martialled and sent to prison.