Page 14 - Puhipi

which a Maori claimed he had been insulted and ill treated were massacred almost to a

man at Whangaroa.

Europeans complicated matters by destroying a village of a neighbouring group who
had not taken part in the affair. Eventually Marsden came to Aotearoa and under the
patronage of Ruatara, a chief to whom he had given hospitality in Sydney, preached

the country’s first Christian service in the Bay of Islands on Christmas day 1814.
“Behold I bring you glad tidings of great joy” was the text of the message brought to a
courteous but scarcely comprehending audience.

Kendall who had produced a small Maori vocabulary went to England in 1820 taking
with him the prominent chiefs Hongi and Waikato. Their contribution to knowledge
was to work with professor Lee, a prominent Cambridge linguist on a grammer of the
Maori language. But Hongi feted in England came back to Sydney to trade his presents

for muskets, gunpowder and bullets. The pattern of intertribal warfare had been well
established but a rough and ready balance had been maintained by the use of old time
Maori weapons. The musket changed all of that.

Hongi set off on campaigns south carrying death and destruction to virtually unarmed
tribes. The wail of the widow echoed through the land and the war canoes brought
home in triumph their baskets of human flesh and hopeless captives. When his enemies
forced his retreat Te Rauparaha of the Ngati Toa marshalled his people at Kawhia and

in 1821 marched them south, men, women and child to Kapiti Island from which
stronghold he terrorised the southern part of the North Island and most of the Sth
Island. His campaigns were series of magnificently organised raids pressed home with

courage, cunning, treachery and cruelty and of course superior weapons.

In the Waikato area Te Wherowhero rose to power and moved into the lands Te
Rauparaha had vacated, suffering one stinging reverse from the wily Ngati Toa chief
when he pursued him into Taranaki. But the Waikato warriors laid Taranaki waste,

so that in an area where thousands had once lived only a few broken families remained
in terrified seclusion deep in the forest. Many Taranaki warriors had however left their
old homes to go campaigning with Te Rauparaha. One party ended up in the Chatham
Islands where they put most of the gentle Morioris to death.

On the Hauraki Plains, Te Waharoa rose to power on the strength of a flair for general
ship and a good armoury. His raids extended far and wide and like Hongi he moved like
the wrath of Tu the war god himself against the Arawa who had been ill advised

enough to provoke him.

For guns the Maori traded dressed flax, spars and produce, and in the 1830s a
considerable business in maize and potatoes was built up through traders with Sydney.

Many tribes left their hill top forts to live in the unhealthy lowlands where the flax