It is the seventeenth day of March 1860, a bright morning without so much as a cloud in the sky. A rainstorm last night has made the approach to our pa heavy going. At last Tommo and I are at war, though I very much doubt that I have the stomach for the killing of men. As the fighting gets under way, I quickly become accustomed to the crack of musket fire and the whine of bullets, even the swish of an artillery canister or the boom of cannon shot. We are mostly underground when the firing from the British lines is at its heaviest and we fire back at them whenever the occasion allows. The explosions produce much sound and light, but little harm seems to be done. Some of our palisades are damaged, and much mud and soil is kicked up from the cannon fire. Once, a roof catches alight, though this is quickly doused.
Tommo is most impatient. ‘When will they come?’ he asks repeatedly. Like me, he is a greenhorn, anxious not to make a fool of himself.
Towards afternoon, a shot from the British cuts the rope which holds our flag, a red banner, more there so that we should have a flag like the British than for the purposes of any loyalty. The Maori die for women and land, not for this piece of bunting which we name the Waitara flag so as to annoy the governor.
The flag flutters to the ground, close to the palisades outside the pa, and we do not think to retrieve it. Then, in the late afternoon during a lull in the firing, we are met with an amazing sight. The British, ever the heroes, have sent two horsemen to capture our fallen banner. Up gallop these two cavalrymen, bent on glory. Up come our muskets, bent on destruction. Bang, bang, bang! One of them is dead, while the other is medal-bound, for he has scooped up the red flag with his home-made lance, turned his horse in a shower of mud clods, and galloped away again, showing us his horse’s arse. I daresay they will one day hang the flag in Westminster Abbey as one of their battle honours— telling their children of the bright bunting hard-won from the ferocious Maori in a noble war of the Empire. Meanwhile, the first man in this battle lies dead in the mud and we are happy that it is an English trooper and not a Maori warrior.
‘Do we have another banner to throw into the mud?’ shouts Hammerhead Jack to much laughter among the men.
At sunset the British decide to cease fighting for the day. They have been pumping shot and cannon fire into us since the early morning and have by now done considerable damage to the pa. It is too dangerous to repair our fortifications and there is some doubt in my mind that we can take another day of bombardment. We have seen from the firing that we are greatly outgunned and that the British still have much the superior numbers. At the war council, however, there is some elation at the day’s events. We have not lost a single man, our food and water supply is intact and our men remain in high spirits.
Tamati Kapene is the first to speak after the general has summed up the day. He is full of bravado and looks meaningfully at me. ‘We have proved the value of the pa to all who may have doubted it. The British guns cannot harm us, their artillery fire is like flies on our skin and their cannons are no more than noisy mosquitoes. If these pests should come tomorrow or the next day, we will brush them off with contempt!’
War Chief Hapurona, who has observed that his aide’s remarks are directed at me, now speaks. ‘What say you, Black Hawk? Have you now observed sufficient of pa fighting to see its value?’
Chief Wiremu Kingi watches me closely. I nod before speaking. ‘I can now see well the virtue of the pa— it is a most excellent system of defence, a brilliant fortification, War Chief Hapurona.’ Then I am silent.
‘Ha!’ Chief Kingi snorts. ‘I think there is more, Black Hawk. Your eyes say there are more words waiting in your head!’
I hesitate a moment. ‘With great respect, has it been observed what the British artillery and cannon have done to our trenches and palisades?’
‘Nothing!’ Tamati Kapene shouts. ‘Our palisades stand firm, they will hold the battle through.’
‘In four places, the cannon fire has filled in our trenches sufficient to allow both horses and foot soldiers to cross them without difficulty,’ I say. ‘In six places, the first row of posts is knocked down and the second palisade is also damaged. With a little more cannon and artillery fire, we will be breached. Tomorrow, towards afternoon if I am not mistaken, the British will be upon us with their guns and bayonets.’
Tamati Kapene points to me and yells, ‘This man is wrong! If they come we have sufficient defences. They will pay with their lives.’
‘And we with ours,’ I reply quietly.
‘Coward!’ Hapurona’s aide shouts, pointing straight at me.
A deep silence follows and I hear Hammerhead Jack whisper beside me, ‘You cannot accept this insult.’
We are seated in a circle. Tamati Kapene is but an arm’s length away and I know he is looking to challenge me. I have my eyes to the ground and I do not look up to meet his. Suddenly, it is as if I am back at the gaol in Kororareka with Maple and Syrup holding my arms and Hori Hura threatening me. I am not sure where the anger comes from, but it is there, slow and cool, rising from somewhere deep within me. My right arm shoots out and I grab Hapurona’s aide by the throat. In a trice, my left hand joins it and at the same time I rise to my feet so that Tamati Kapene is jerked upwards. The aide is a big man, but he now seems slight enough, for I pull him higher and higher until his feet are well off the ground and his head above my own.
I can see the young Maori’s eyes as they near pop from his head. His arms flail and his legs kick wildly. Then they stop, as though the strength has gone from them. My fingers tighten and there is still more pressure I can bring. I would not need it all to kill him.
‘Put him down, Black Hawk,’ Hapurona says in a low voice.
I drop his aide, who falls to the floor unconscious. It is only then that I feel the strain in my arms from lifting a human of more than two hundred pounds in weight and holding him in the air as a child would a rag doll.
‘Sit, General Black Hawk,’ Wiremu Kingi commands and I sink slowly back to the ground. The old chief signals for two warriors to drag Tamati Kapene out of the way. With the heat gone from me, I wonder if I should apologise. I make to open my mouth but Hammerhead Jack squeezes my shoulder.
‘Ork good,’ he whispers in English. ‘No talk.’
‘We will leave tonight, before the moon rises,’ is all Hapurona says. ‘Tell your men to be ready.’
‘What’s going on?’ Tommo asks as I tell him to make his axe fighters ready to move out.
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Tomorrow the small wars start in earnest.’
‘About bleedin’ time!’ he replies.
Before we leave that night, Chief Kingi calls me to him. ‘So, Black Hawk, we live to fight another day, eh? Is it always so with you, to run in the face of a fight? Soon they will no longer call you General Black Hawk but instead General Back Off!’
I am mortified by these words. ‘Chief Kingi,’ I stammer, ‘to die foolishly does not make a man a hero.’
The old chief looks at me a moment. ‘You are right, General Black Hawk. Tonight Tamati Kapene would have died foolishly at your hands and he would not have been a hero.’
‘I am sorry, Chief,’ I say.
His eyebrows shoot up. ‘Sorry? You are sorry? I am not sorry, Black Hawk. The Maori are a stubborn people, sometimes even boastful. We are given to exaggerating our prowess at war. If you had not acted as you had, there would have been no small wars for you. Instead, I would have sent you back to Chief Tamihana like a dog with your tail between your legs. We would have stayed to fight the British and we would have been soundly beaten.’
‘I am most grateful for your support, Chief, but I am told Tamati Kapene is a bold warrior, and I have humiliated him. I have yet to know if I myself will behave with boldness in this war.’
‘He is bold and stupid! We have many like him. Sometimes the Maori give their lives too quickly!’ The old man begins to laugh. ‘We will soon enough see what you are made of, General. We go to a place called Waireka, where we shall build a pa
, but in the meantime you will harass Colonel Murray and his regulars. It is good country for your kind of fighting and then we shall see what we shall see of this campaign.’
We leave the pa while the British slumber. Later I learn that at first light, the British pound the pa with artillery fire, thinking to take it in the early afternoon. When after three hours there is still no return fire, they keep firing, thinking it is a ruse to lure them closer. Then, towards noon, they send in the cavalry with swords drawn and find that the enemy has escaped from right under their superior British noses.
We have melted into the surrounding countryside and now it is my turn to fight. I have sent out raiding parties, for we have news that some of the pakeha have returned to their farms, believing that Murray will soon finish us off. I know I must quickly put a stop to this. Fear of the Maori’s power to strike anywhere at any time is a most important aspect of our campaign.
Over the next week, my men raid the settler farms, and we come by many horses so that we now have several dozen fighters mounted on horseback, myself sometimes amongst them. Our attacks are designed only to instil fear, and to make a livelihood impossible by destroying property and stealing livestock. It is only against the army that we wage war.
We enjoy good success against Murray’s regulars, harassing, ambushing and killing several of his troopers. Our small wars are proving most effective, for the Maori take to it easily and are well disciplined in action. The broken-wooded country provides our warriors with ideal cover, and our ambushes are swift and devised more to disconcert than to take many lives, though some of the British soldiers give up their lives stupidly.
I have convinced the Maori that to destroy a supply wagon or ammunition cart is more important than taking a trooper’s life. Soldiers, I point out, fight on their stomachs and we are making it as difficult as possible for Murray to feed his troops. Already, much of their food must come by sea. As a result, we have captured or destroyed several wagons. Murray has only one trump card, the Taranaki Rifle Volunteer Company, and this he uses badly. We seek to avoid these sharpshooters at all cost, and I later learn that they are the first British volunteer force to engage an enemy in the field.
It is curious, and yet another measure of British arrogance, that Murray and his Imperial officers much underrate these men and do not give them credit for their knowledge. Nor do they allow them the opportunity to come out after us. I thank God for this, for the volunteers are able to match us in almost every respect. They are the sons of men from Cornwall and Devon, and nearly twenty years of Taranaki life has moulded them into expert bushmen, familiar with the forest tracks and the terrain, and thus able to meet us on level terms. Some are on horseback and, being more skilled riders than we, are able to move swiftly to harass us.
Chief Wiremu Kingi and War Chief Hapurona know well the families who form much of the hundred-strong Rifle Volunteer Company. The Atkinsons, Smiths, Hursthouses, Bayleys, Messengers and Northcrofts are all respected as good frontiersmen and as hard, brave men. We know we would be in for a good fight if we were to come up against them. But while we have only to contend with Murray’s slow-moving and often badly led regulars from the 65th Regiment, we enjoy the upper hand.
We are now based at a strong pa at Waireka, only five miles from New Plymouth, and it is from here that I direct my patrols to look for any brave settlers who think it safe to return. Each patrol is only six men— three axe fighters, two shotguns and a musket. Tommo commands one of the raiding parties, for I cannot contain him any longer. He must, he says, lead his men by example.
Only ten days have passed since our confrontation with Murray, when Tommo’s band comes across a well-defended homestead and, for the first time, encounters serious resistance. He tells me later that there are four muskets aimed at them from a well-secured position in the farmhouse. These rifled muskets are most accurate and Tommo’s band is pinned down behind a small copse of rocks and scrub. One of his shotgun warriors is wounded, though only lightly. They are not close enough to use the shotguns, while the warrior with the musket is no sharpshooter and provides little enough firepower against the four settlers.
Tommo instructs his musket to keep firing at the farmhouse. The wounded man too is told to fire his shotgun as a diversion. Tommo takes the remaining shotgun warrior and the two axemen and they creep up to the rear of the farmhouse while the others draw the settlers’ fire.
Tommo is hoping that the settlers will think they have wounded or killed the other four Maori. He has commanded the two Maori left behind to fire as rapidly as possible for about ten minutes, hoping that the enemy will retaliate with equal determination. His ploy works perfectly. Tommo and his men reach the homestead when both sides are firing with gusto, and the noise allows Tommo to break down a door at the back of the farmhouse and enter.
What follows is simple enough as Tommo’s band takes the settlers completely by surprise. The house is filled with smoke from the muskets and when they reach the room from which the men are firing, Tommo and his men let go a blast from the shotgun, further filling the room with dense smoke. At the same time they rush in with their axes— Tommo in the lead. It is over in a moment, and four men soon lie dead at the hands of three axe fighters.
It is only then that Tommo discovers, to his horror, that two of them are mere lads of ten or eleven years old, though they stood bravely by their guns. Tommo is shocked and deeply ashamed. The three Maori with him swear that with all the smoke from the muskets and shotgun, it was impossible to see well enough to gauge the age of the four people in the room. Each of those four, they feel sure, would have killed them with an easy conscience had the surprise attack been the other way around. Nevertheless, Tommo believes that his fighting axes have spilt bad blood and he is anxious to go out again at the first opportunity to fight Murray’s regulars. ‘Give us a go against the British bayonets. I got no stomach for killing little boys,’ he says sourly when he returns that night.
I try to comfort him and remind him that in the wilderness as a nine-year-old, he was deemed a man and could as easily have been killed by any timber getter. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘But lads ten years old ain’t yet mongrels in their hearts.’
Like Tommo, I am already sickened by this war. I fear Wiremu Kingi may be right and that I shall become General Back Off whenever I may find an opportunity to avoid bloodshed.
The British are enraged when they discover the killing of the two boys at first light the next day, even though it is quite clear that it was a terrible mistake. We fight only against the volunteer militia and the British military. Our enemies are those who have obtained Maori land without the permission of the whole tribe, or who fight to gain even more. Ours is a fight against greed, not against women and children. But the boys’ deaths strike such terror that they cannot go unpunished and we wait for the soldiers to march against our pa.
We expect the British forces to attack us later that morning, but they do not issue forth from New Plymouth until one o’clock, a strange time to commence battle. We manage to keep them at bay, although their cannons and the artillery fire from their naval contingent keep us contained. For the first three hours it all seems to go in the usual way— the softening-up process by the British with us returning fire— and there is not much damage done except to a few palisades.
Then, to our enormous surprise, the British regulars from the 65th and the navy artillery contingent withdraw and set off to return to New Plymouth, leaving only the militia to hold us down. It is well before sunset and the volunteer militia, valiant and capable as they are, have only the old, slow-loading, smooth-bore muskets. As we will later learn, they have each been issued with only thirty rounds of ammunition to hold us for the night. Such is Colonel Murray’s contempt for the Maori and disregard for the local volunteers.
For once the numbers are on our side and our weapons superior to theirs. There is great rejoicing in the pa and we send patrols out to harass the militia, intending to take them in a full frontal att
ack during the night when their muskets are least effective. They are not fools and retreat to a nearby farmhouse, where they construct a palisade. It is soon apparent that they cannot hold out against us. I am anxious to go in with a large force from the pa while daylight lasts, but this is an offensive under the control of War Chief Hapurona.
Hapurona decides to wait until nightfall. My fear is that these are settler militia who know the terrain and will use the cover of darkness to escape, as we did. It is here that I make a mistake of judgment which costs us dear.
So that they will not think to attempt escape, I use my men to harass the militia in the farmhouse and keep them pinned down. Unbeknownst to us, they have conceded that they must die in a night attack. With only thirty rounds of ammunition per man, they decide to use up all their firepower, hoping to intimidate my patrols before they perish, brave men all. For an hour they fire repeatedly as we wait for night to descend. Then Hapurona’s warriors will go in with their shotguns and we with our fighting axes and spears against the settlers’ swords and muskets.
A great many of Hapurona’s warriors have assembled some distance outside the pa, ready to go against the enemy, when the navy suddenly re-appears. Later we learn that they have heard the gunfire and so have decided to disobey their orders to return to New Plymouth, choosing instead to march towards the sound of firing.
A terrible bloodbath ensues. We are trapped in near darkness between the militia and the pa by the naval artillery fire, and are cut to ribbons. Many of our warriors die before we are able to scatter into the night. What had seemed like a certain victory for the Maori before sunset, is by moonrise a dreadful defeat. The single initiative of a lone naval commander, who decided to disobey Murray’s instructions, has saved the day for the British, at a great loss to the Maori.
Tommo and Hawk Page 27
