THE FIGHT AT MOTUROA STOCKADE
Kātené's vigil--Attack on the stockade--Major Hunter's death--A
Hauhau warrior's desperate feat--Over the palisades--Government
forces repulsed--A rear-guard fight--An unanswered prayer--Scenes
of terror--Tihirua's burnt-offering--A soldier's body eaten.
Just within the stockade of the Moturoa, or Papa-tihakehake _pa_,[10]
there was a small, roughly built _taumaihi_, or look-out stage, ten or
twelve feet above the ground, high enough to allow a sentinel to see
well over the sharp-pointed palisades, and scan the approaches to the
fort.
In this bush watch-tower there stood, at misty dawn on a grey November
morning, the Hauhau scout and warrior Kātené Tu-Whakaruru.
Kātené was cold, and he stamped his bare feet upon the unbarked logs
that floored the sentry-box, and he chanted softly to himself a little
_waiata_ to Kopu, the morning star, which he had looked for in vain,
for a heavy drizzling mist obscured everything. The thin, persistent
rain penetrated the blanket that he held closely wrapped about him.
Presently a faint light began to steal over the forest, and Kātené
could see the outlines of the black charred stumps and burned trees in
front of the _pa_, then beyond the gloomy woods, through which a narrow
winding path led to the open fern-lands of the Wairoa.
Suddenly Kātené's murmured chant ceased, and he strained his eyes
into the mist. To a Maori forester the slightest sound was enough to
set every faculty on the alert, asking suspiciously, "_He aha tena!_"
He had heard a faint sound in the direction of the track beyond the
black tree-stumps, a sound that he fancied resembled the striking of
steel against steel.
Kātené hardly breathed. His eyes glared fixedly through the mist. In
a few minutes his vision confirmed the evidence of his keen ears. He
saw, just for a moment, a dark figure, then another, come hazily out of
the wet fog where the track from the Wairoa emerged on the clearing,
then disappear, as if they had suddenly dropped to the ground or
vanished behind a tree.
That glimpse was enough for Kātené. He dropped from his
sentry-perch, and ran from _wharé_ to _wharé_ and tent to tent giving
the alarm.
"The soldiers are coming!" he said to those whom he awakened. "The
soldiers are on us! They are by now entering the clearing. Get your
arms quickly! Man the trenches! But don't make a sound!"
The fighting-men poured out of their sleeping huts, snatching up their
weapons and accoutrements, and ran to their places in the pits and
ditches behind the stockade. They hastily loaded their _tuparas_,
their rifles, and their carbines, and, peering eagerly through the
defence-works, sought to penetrate the raw, damp morning mist that
shrouded their front.
The whole bush-castle was alive and ready. Every man and boy who could
shoulder a gun was in the well-hidden firing lines.
The wet mist slightly lifting as the morning light came, the musketeers
presently saw dim figures moving out from the dark forest on their
front and right and left flanks. Moving quickly, half running, in a
cautious, crouching gait, they flitted from tree to tree, and burnt
stump to stump, and nearer and nearer to the stockade.
Not a sound came from the breathlessly waiting warriors, nor from the
ghost-like figures that now sank to the ground, each behind a log or a
great blackened stump, or the butt of a standing tree.
Gun in hand, finger on the trigger, the Hauhaus waited.
The apparitions were picked bush-fighters of the New Zealand forces,
led by Colonel Whitmore, seeking to surprise Titoko in his forest-den.
Advancing silently in skirmishing order through the bush, they took
cover, waiting for light enough to fight by. There were detachments
of four divisions of the Armed Constabulary, many of them veteran
bush-fighters, and men of the Patea Rifles and Patea Cavalry. There,
too, came Kepa's Whanganui Maoris, with rifle and tomahawk, old hands
on the war-trail, and eager for another brush with their ancient
enemies of Taranaki.
There were two hundred Government men fronting the fort, but the
fighting men behind the palisades did not, according to Maori accounts,
number many more than half the number.
Amongst Titokowaru's men, however, there were some of the most renowned
bush scouts and warriors in Taranaki, including--besides Kātené,
the wide-awake sentry--such men as the veteran Te Waka-tapa-ruru,
Paraone Tuteré, one of the best Hauhau shots, Timoti, the fiercest
of the cannibals of Nga-Rauru, and the active young warrior Tutangé
Waionui, he who had despatched von Tempsky on the battle-field of
Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu. Tutangé says that he was asleep in a tent when
Kātené gave the alarm that morning. He was with his tribe, the
Nga-Rauru, most ferocious of all Maori bush-fighters, who occupied one
end of the _pa_; the other tribes holding the fort were Ngati-Ruanui
and Pakakohi. It was the side occupied by the Pakakohi men that was
first attacked.
All at once, as the Hauhaus crouched behind their palisades squinting
for a sight of _pakeha_, with impatient fingers on their gun-triggers,
fifty or sixty blue and grey figures sprang from cover and charged for
the stockade. Some of the assaulting party ran past the corner of the
war-fence, looking for some opening or gateway by which they might
charge in.
The leading files were within a few paces of the high, solidly set
palisading, when suddenly the whole face of the fence flashed fire, and
volleys crashed in terrifying reverberations that set flocks of sleepy
_kaka_ parrots flying, screaming harsh screams of fright, through the
dark forest.
Nearly half the storming party of A.C.'s fell before that fearful fire.
The first man shot was their leader, a brave officer, Major Hunter,
whose brother, Captain Hunter, had fallen at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu two
months previously. Tutangé says that it was Paraone Tuteré who shot the
major; he fired at the leading figure, not knowing then who he was.
Colonel Whitmore came running in with the stormers, but, with his usual
luck, although in the thickest fighting he was never hit.
Those of the attacking column who were not hit instantly dropped to
cover amongst the logs and stumps that surrounded the _pa_ front.
Then they returned the fire as well as they could, but one man after
another was hit, without being able to see one Hauhau of the scores
that occupied the _pa_ and thrust the muzzles of their guns through the
interstices of the palisades.
It was a foolish thing, that blind frontal charge on the strong
stockade. Major Hunter was too good a soldier to have done such an
insane thing of his own volition. He was obeying Whitmore's orders.
Hunter was shot in the femoral artery, when within nine or ten yards
of the stockade. He implored those near him to try to stop the gushing
blood, and some of his comrades attempted to staunch it; but the wound
was too close to the stomach to get at, and he died in a few minutes.
Captain W. E. Gudgeon, with about forty Government Maoris, tried to
work round and take the _pa_ in the rear. His line of charge was on
Hunter's right flank, and he had good cover, but in spite of that he
lost two killed and five wounded.
Now a brisk little fight went on on the flanks of the _pa_ between
Kepa's men and a party of warriors who had made a sortie from the
stockade. Kepa was furiously assailed by the bushmen, leaping from tree
to tree, yelling their frightful Hauhau cries; and it was as much as
the plucky Whanganui men could do to hold their own. Their attempt to
take the _pa_ in the rear failed, and they at last slowly withdrew to
support the shattered ranks of their white comrades.
The A.C. supports came doubling up, and a heavy fire was concentrated
on the stockade, but to little purpose. It was impregnable to
rifle-fire, and in their pitted works the defenders were able to pick
off the white skirmishers in perfect safety.
Bullets swept the clearing in every direction, and through the infernal
music of the forest-battle the white soldiers heard the loudly yelled
war-cries of the chiefs and the shrill voices of the Maori women as
they encouraged their warriors, husbands, and brothers, and screamed
them on to slaughter with all the fury of brown tattooed Hecates.
The women were gathered in the _marae_ and in the trenches, some armed,
all filled with the fire of savage war.
"_Ka horo, ka horo!_" they shouted. "_Kia maia, kia maia! Patua,
kainga! Patua, kainga!_" ("They fall, they fall! Be brave, oh, be
brave! Kill them, eat them! Kill them, eat them!")
All this time Kimble Bent was walking to and fro on the _parepare_, the
inner breastwork, the bullets screaming _zssh! zssh!_ over his head
and all about him. The air seemed filled with flying lead, yet very
few Maoris were hit. One woman he saw shot dead through the head as
she rose to wave her shawl and yell a fighting cry to the men at the
palisades.
And here Bent was an eye-witness of the most desperately daring deed he
had ever seen.
A fiery old tattooed warrior, by name Te Waka-tapa-ruru--the Hauhau
mentioned in an earlier chapter as the man who had killed Charles
Broughton, Government Native Agent, on the Patea River, in 1865--was
in a quiver of excitement while the garrison awaited the assault, and
could hardly be silenced until the attack was delivered.
When the _pakeha_ storming party rushed up at the double, the old man
was one of the first to open fire on them with his _tupara_. And then,
when the order "_Kokiritia!_" ("Charge!") was given, and the Hauhaus
rushed out to engage the Government men who were trying to work round
to the rear of the _pa_, he led the wild charge.
Perfectly naked, except for the broad flax waist-girdle, which held his
short-handled tomahawk, and gripping his double-barrelled gun, the tall
old savage took a great running jump at the stockade from the inner
parapet, and leaped clean over it!
Yelling a _Pai-mariré_ battle-cry as he rose from the ground after his
extraordinary leap, he snatched the tomahawk from his belt, and charged
straight for the advancing whites.
It was a fit of _whakamomori_--sheer blind desperation, utter
recklessness of death.
Possibly the furious old fanatic imagined that his Hauhau angel and his
mesmeric password, "_Hapa! Pai-mariré! Hau!_" would avert the bullets
of the _pakeha_. But he was killed in the very charge--the only Maori
fighting-man killed that day.
Two white soldiers met him. He was in the act of striking a desperate
blow when a _pakeha_ ball took him square in the forehead, and with a
huge convulsive bound and a half-choked barking "_Hau!_" on his lips,
the old tattooed brave fell dead amongst the foremost of his enemies.
It was just the death that he desired--face to the foe, with his
war-axe in his hand--the death of a true Maori _toa_!
This savage hero's son, Ratoia--now living in the village of
Taiporohenui--a young boy at the time of the fight, saw his father's
great leap over the palisade, and saw him killed.
Bent tells of a curious _matakité_, or prophetic dream, which Te
Waka-tapa-ruru had on the night before the battle. The old man was a
close friend of the white runaway, and they were accustomed to sleep
side by side on the _whariki_-spread floor of one of the huts. He
dreamed that he saw his face reflected in a _pakeha_ looking-glass, and
that he was combing his hair. This vision disturbed the old man, and
deeming it a warning from the unseen world, he asked Titokowaru--just
when the approach of the troops was first announced--what it might
portend. The war-chief interpreted the dream as an omen of death, and
warned Te Waka not to leave the shelter of the stockade during the
impending engagement or he would be killed. But he disregarded this in
his fit of _whakamomori_, and ran amok, and so he fell.
Finding it impossible to take such a strong and well-defended position
by storm, the white colonel withdrew his forces. There were dead and
wounded lying all over the place. The _pakehas_ succeeded in carrying
off the wounded and some of the dead, including the gallant Major
Hunter. A number of dead, however, had to be left where they were
lying, for it was death to attempt their removal from under the very
muzzles of the Hauhau guns.
The rescue of Hunter's body from the Hauhau tomahawks, under a heavy
fire, was a gallant piece of work. Captain Gudgeon was one of those who
brought the dead officer out; one of his comrades was Captain Edward
McDonnell, and troopers Foote and Kelly were amongst the others. Two
or three men were shot in the attempt. Kepa (Major Kemp) was there,
too, but he was pretty well engaged in looking after his own men and
extricating them from that place of death.
[Illustration: MAJOR KEMP (KEPA TE RANGIHIWINUI.)]
The Colonial soldiers retired, fighting a hard rear-guard action, out
to the edge of the bush. Each division of Armed Constabulary in turn
halted, knelt down facing the enemy, and covered the retreat of the
other divisions, thus giving time for those of the dead and wounded
who had been recovered to be carried off the field. Out to the
fern-lands the Hauhaus followed the troops, sometimes engaging them
so closely that the fighting was hand-to-hand, and it was carbine and
revolver against long-handled tomahawk. The skirmishing lasted until
the whites were well clear of the bush; the Maoris would have followed
them out even to their camp, the Wairoa Redoubt, had not they been
recalled by orders from Titokowaru. The battle of Papa-tihakehake was
over. It was a more severe repulse for the Government men than even
the engagement at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu a bare two months before. One man
out of every four in the force actually engaged was on the casualty
list--more than twenty killed and quite thirty wounded.[11]
[Illustration: THE FIGHT AT MOTUROA, 1869.
This sketch, with the one opposite, drawn by an eye-witness shortly
after the engagement, depicts the defeat of the Government A.C. Force
by the Maoris.]
[Illustration: THE FIGHT AT MOTUROA, 1869.]
* * * * *
A grim story of that hard-fought retreat through the bush is told by
Kimble Bent.
After the _kokiri_, the rush out in pursuit, had been ordered by
the Maori war-chief, one of the Nga-Rauru men came across a white
soldier lying on the ground, with his head pillowed against a fallen
_pukatea_-tree. He had been cut off from his division by the foremost
of the pursuing Hauhaus, and was lying there feigning death, hoping
that the rest of the Maoris would pass on and not notice him.
The Nga-Rauru man, however, stopped and looked closely at the prostrate
_pakeha_. He said to one of his comrades, "I don't think that man
is dead." Going up to the Constabulary man, he put his hand on his
shoulder, and said in English, "Wake up!"
The white man opened his eyes. He exclaimed, "Save my life! Let me go,
and I'll never forget you--I'll repay you for it."
The Nga-Rauru man, who must have been a humorous kind of barbarian,
said to his victim, again in English, "Go on your knees and pray to
your God to save your life!"
The soldier knelt as he was told, and ejaculated some sort of a prayer.
Playing with his prey, the savage asked, "Well, are you saved now?"
The kneeling soldier looked up, but could make no answer. He stared at
his terrible-looking captor, with horror in his eyes.
"_Poroporoaki ki to Atua!_" ("Say farewell to your God!") cried the
Maori, and swinging his gun round in both hands, he brought it butt
down with a frightful smashing blow on the soldier's head.
The man fell backwards dead. His slayer stripped him of his uniform
and accoutrements, and a little later could have been seen dancing
a furious _haka_ in front of the stockade, his face blackened with
charcoal from the charred tree-stumps, the soldier's cap on his head,
and the captured carbine in his hand.
Young Tutangé Waionui was in the thick of the skirmishing. "My
weapons that day," he says, "were a _tupara_ (double-barrelled gun)
and a revolver. The gun was a muzzle-loader; I preferred it to the
breech-loaders used by the _pakeha_, because something was always going
wrong with them. I could load (_puru-pu_) very quickly; but a quicker
man was old Te Waka-tapa-ruru--he who was killed; there was no one so
expert as he at loading a muzzle-loader."
What scenes of horror followed that battle in the bush!
The Hauhaus were in a delirium of triumphant savagery. Like
frenzied things they came dancing and yelling back to the _pa_.
They had blackened their ferocious faces with charcoal from the
burnt tree-stumps in front of the _pa_. Singing war-songs, shouting
_Pai-mariré_ cries, dancing their weapons in the air, projecting their
long snaky tongues and rolling their eyes till only the whites were
visible, set in a petrifying glare--the grimace of the _pukana_--it
was a sight that brought fear to the heart of the lone white man,
accustomed though he was by this time to spectacles of barbaric
ferocity.
The women were as wild and savage-looking as the men--their dark eyes
blazing with excitement, their faces black-painted like the warriors,
their loosened hair flying behind them, many of them nude from the
waist up--waving shawls, mats, tomahawks, in welcome to the returning
heroes, shouting, singing, screaming.
* * * * *
Outside the front fence of the _pa_, just us they fell, among the logs
and stumps and on the blood-stained ground, lay the dead men whom the
retreating A.C.'s had been compelled to leave on the battle-field.
There were seven of them.
Upon these fallen soldiers rushed the Hauhaus. They stripped them of
their uniforms. They tied flax-leaf ropes round the necks of the dead
_pakehas_, and hauled them away to the gateway of the _pa_.
As they dragged the corpses off, leaping from side to side as they
hauled in a fury of blood-madness, they shouted out such sentences as
these:
"_Taku kai! Taku kai! E hara ka kite noho koe taku kai, taku tika, taku
he! Nau te kino, naku whakahoki ton kino. Taea hokitia--te mahi o te
atua a Titokowaru!_" ("My food! My food! Behold my food; behold the
right and the wrong of it all. 'Twas you"--addressing the slain--"that
wrought the evil work. And I have returned your evil. Behold the work
of the god of Titokowaru!")
A young Hauhau, huge-limbed and naked but for a very brief waist-mat
of dangling flax, leaps to the side of one of the white men's bodies,
just as it is harnessed in so revolting a fashion to be dragged into
the _pa_.
His tomahawk flashes in the air above him as he steps over the fallen
soldier--once, twice, thrice!
He thrusts in a hand into a huge gaping wound in the dead man's breast;
he is searching for something. He rises with some object, all bloody,
in his horrible red hand. He sticks his tomahawk back into his girdle,
he comes bounding from the corpse, waving his dripping trophy in his
hand, swinging it round his head. His fiendish yells ring echoing over
the forest clearing.
What is it he flourishes so exultingly?
It is the white man's heart!
This is the young warrior Tihirua, the priest of the burnt sacrifice.
He has torn out the _manawa_ of the soldier, as a _mawé_--an offering
to the God of War!
At his waist, buckled to his flax girdle, is a leather pouch, such as
was generally used for carrying percussion-caps. Out of this he takes
matches--_pakeha_ matches! Striking match after match, he holds them
underneath the bleeding heart until it is singed, and dark smoke goes
up from it--incense to Uenuku, the war-god, who appears to his savage
worshippers in the arch of the rainbow.
The heathen rite--the ceremony of the _Whangai-hau_--performed, Tihirua
flings down his terrible trophy, and then directs the hauling of the
bodies into the palisaded inferno.
* * * * *
Bent, standing just outside the _pa_ gateway, watched the in-bringing
of the bodies of his fellow-whites--prelude, he too well knew, to a
cannibal feast.
He turned to enter the village, when an old Maori, tugging away madly
at a flax line which he had made fast to the neck of a dead man, caught
sight of him, and shouted:
"You, _pakeha_! Come and give me a hand. Help me to drag in my food!"
"What do you want?" Bent heard a rough voice ask. He turned and saw
the war-chief Titokowaru standing at his side. "What do you want of
this _pakeha_?"
The Maori replied that he wished the white man to help him haul the
soldier's body into the _marae_.
"No!" cried the chief in his great hoarse voice. "No! you must not call
upon my _pakeha_ to help you. He shall not touch the bodies of his
countrymen."
So the war-captain and his cartridge-maker stood by watching the
frightful procession of Hauhaus and their prizes. The seven naked
bodies were dragged into the _pa_ and laid out in the centre of the
_marae_.
The excited people all gathered in a great circle around the bodies.
One after another the orators leaped out from the squatting ranks,
their eyes flashing wildly in the _pukana_ glare; they bounded to and
fro, and cut the air with their tomahawks as they told the thrilling
episodes of the fight.
All the clothes, arms, and accoutrements taken from the dead and
wounded were laid before Titokowaru.
"Whose was this?" the war-chief would ask, picking up a carbine, or an
ammunition-pouch, or a soldier's tunic from the heap.
"Mine," replied the man who had taken it on the battle-field.
"Take it away, then," said Titokowaru. "Whose is this?" picking up
another trophy.
"It is mine," a young man would reply; "it is my first spoils of war, a
_tanga-ika_."
"Burn it," was the chief's order.
Then the human bodies lying on the _marae_ were apportioned one by one,
to each tribe, as piles of food are served out at a ceremonial Maori
gathering.
"Nga-Rauru, this is yours! Tangahoé, this is yours!" and so on, till
the seven bodies were all disposed of.
A woman sat weeping on the _marae_. She was Te Hau-karewa, wife to
one Te Rangi-whakairi-papa and a sister of Te Waka-tapa-ruru, the old
warrior who had fallen in his desperate rush upon the white enemy that
morning. Though old, she was a tall, fine-looking woman, with a mass
of black curly hair.
Ceasing her _tangi_ for the dead, when the bodies of the soldiers were
laid out on the ground, she rose, and, taking a stick in her hand, she
walked along the row of the dead men and struck each a blow on the head.
"_Upoko-kohua!_" she cried vehemently, with hate flashing in her eyes;
"_Upoko-kohua! Ka taona koe ki te umu, he utu mo taku tungane kua mate,
ko Te Waka-tapa-ruru! Mehemea ko au i tata i taku tungane i te takiwa
i mate ai, ka kainga au i te karu o te tangata nana i whakamatea Te
Waka!_" ("Boiled heads! Cursed heads! Soon ye'll be cooked in the oven,
as payment for the death of my brother, Te Waka-tapa-ruru. Had I but
been near my brother when he fell, I would have swallowed the eyes of
the man who slew him!")
Then, throwing away her stick, she sat down again, and fell to weeping
in the very abandonment of woe, for the savage woman of the woods loved
her grim warrior-brother greatly.
* * * * *
Some of the Maoris proposed that the bodies of the slain whites, the
"Fish of Whiro," should all be burned or buried.
But up leaped Timoti, wildest of all the wild Waitotara tribe,
the cannibal Nga-Rauru, a thin, savage-faced fellow, very dark of
complexion, as active and agile as a wild cat. He ran up and down
in front of his slain enemies, turning from one side to the other,
_pukana_-ing--only the whites of his eyes showing--and his tongue
protruded in derision and defiance. He flashed his tomahawk in the air;
he yelled, "We must have one body--one body to cook in the _hangi_!"
"Yes," said another of the clan, "the customs of our fathers must be
observed. What is the use of killing so many _pakehas_ if we cannot
have one to eat?"
No man making objection, several Hauhaus jumped up and ran to the heap
of slain Constabulary men. They selected a body, and dragged it off to
the cooking-place at the rear of the _marae_. "He is the fattest of the
_pakehas_," said the saturnine Timoti.
All eyes watched them, but no man said a word.
Bent, after a while, rose with some of his Hauhau companions, and
walked over to the cooking-_hangis_, and watched the cooks at their
horrible work.
They were roasting the white man's body on the great fire of hot
stones, in a hollowed-out earth-oven. "It was being cooked," says Bent,
"much as you would roast a piece of mutton; they turned it over and
over until it was thoroughly done, and then they cut it up for the
feast."
When the cannibal meal was ready, it was brought on to the _marae_
with much ceremony in flax baskets. Potatoes had been steam-boiled
in other _hangis_ at the same time, and these were carried to the
assembly-ground, to be eaten with the man-meat. Bent saw the flesh
of the soldier eaten. The man-eaters, he says, all belonged to the
Waitotara tribe. Ten of them consumed the _pakeha_, or as much of him
as was borne to the _marae_; the rest of the people did not share in
the feast. Titokowaru himself would not eat human flesh, because of his
_tapu_.
"I noticed," says the _pakeha_-Maori, "Timoti and Big Kereopa, each
with a basket before them, enjoying the meal of human flesh. Timoti
grabbed up his portion of meat from his basket, and ate it just as if
he were eating a piece of bread."
Then Titokowaru rose and, crying in a loud voice, ordered the people
to burn the rest of the corpses, so that they should not defile the
_marae_.
The bundles of clothing from the dead lay on the _marae_. The Maoris
gave Bent three pairs of soldiers' trousers, four shirts, and some
boots. "I tell you I was pleased," says the old _pakeha_-Maori, who had
no inconvenient scruples on the subject of dead men's clothes; "for a
long time I had been wearing only Maori-made garments of flax."
A great pile of wood was collected, heaped up six or seven feet high,
and in the evening, as darkness fell, the bodies of the _pakehas_ were
placed on this funeral pyre and cremated.
The people squatted round--as they had sat at a similar ceremony in
the "Bird's Beak" _pa_--and watched the flames devour their fallen
foemen. And by the light of the great fire roaring away there on the
_marae_, Titokowaru _taki_'d up and down, addressing his followers, and
bounding and parading to and fro, his sacred feather-plumed _taiaha_ in
his hand. He recited incantations, and chanted songs, and exhorted the
Hauhaus, bidding them be of good heart and fight to the bitter end.
Then Titokowaru turned to the body of the slain warrior Te
Waka-tapa-ruru, lying on a blanket on the _marae_, with gun and
tomahawk by his side. Gazing upon the silent, tattooed features of
the dead _toa_, his comrade in many a wild foray and forest battle,
he cried the old farewells to those whose spirits have passed to the
_Reinga_, and he chanted this lament:
"_Ki konei ra, e Waka e!
Ka wehe koe i au.
Ka riro i a koe
I nuku-maniapoto,
E ngakinga mate.
Aue, e Waka e!_"
("There thou liest, O Waka!
Parted from me for ever.
Thou'rt borne away to the fields of night,
In revenge for other deaths.
Alas, O Waka!")
And the wild _korero_ went on. _Tangi_ songs were chanted, and there
were speeches of savage, boastful jubilation made--"great swelling
words." But from a lone little thatched hut on one side of the
crowded parade ground came a long-sustained crying sound, a sobbing
heart-breaking dirge, rising and falling like a Highland coronach--a
keening for the dead. Te Hau-karewa made lamentation for her slain
warrior.