We fight on for ever!

“Are we, the sons of the greatest nation of the earth for ever to knuckle under to a parcel of savages?” asked a furious writer in his local newspaper. The answer was that they, the white settlers of New Zealand, were not. They wanted land and they considered that the Maoris were not using the land properly. As for the Maoris, they could not understand the greed of the whites for land. This was the situation in New Zealand in the mid-1850s. Yet it was only a little more than a decade since the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 had made Maori land supposedly safe for ever, unless the Maoris wanted to sell it.

The trouble was that the settlers, having mostly failed with their small farms, were turning to sheep-farming and needed big grassy areas to raise the animals. They would buy Maori land, burn the bush and forest, and plant grass. Officially, they bought land through a Crown agent, but there were plenty of land-sharks to do unofficial deals with those Maoris willing to sell. There had already been small-scale wars between the races, but now the countdown to a major war had begun. Many on both sides were spoiling for a fight. As the historian Keith Sinclair has written, the Maori wars “began in men’s minds before they were fought out in the fern and the bush.”

The flash-point was the area round New Plymouth in Taranaki Province on the North Island, in which most Maoris lived. The whites’ demand for land had split the tribes, but a king was elected and they began to think of themselves as one nation and not as a number of quarrelling fragments. There was not a moment to be lost: in 1858, whites for the first time outnumbered the 56,000 Maoris. Men of goodwill lamented the fact that Governor Grey, a brilliant man, had left New Zealand to govern Cape Colony. The new governor, Sir Thomas Gore Browne, was not the man for the coming crisis. Previous governors had tried to protect the Maoris, but Gore Browne simply turned a blind eye to the problem. He would not see that the Maoris who were willing to sell land were in a minority, and he considered a chief named Wiremu Kingi, who objected to the sales, to be a trouble-maker.

The settlers knew the answer: force. They got their wish, though the first fight was a non-event. Troops attacked and captured a “pa”, or fortified village, but it was empty. It was 1860, and Kingi would be on the warpath for 12 years. The good intentions that had made the colony of New Zealand so different from others in the age of Empire had collapsed. It hardly helped that the British troops and the local soldiers did not get on, the latter not appreciating just how difficult fighting the Maoris was. Not that the Maoris fought a guerrilla war — they preferred to hole up in an inaccessible pa and look forward to a white attack. When the soldiers launched frontal assaults, the results were usually disastrous.

The soldiers began approaching these strongholds with covered trenches known as saps. This entertained the Maoris very much. Once they even offered to help build the saps for a shilling a day! But perseverance won the whites several battles. There was a truce for a while and the settlers argued amongst themselves about what to do. Especially warlike noises were made by politicians from the South Island who had few Maoris to deal with. Meanwhile, Governor Grey, hearing what was going on in New Zealand, volunteered to come back. The authorities agreed, and he returned in 1861. He did his best to calm both races, but he built a road which pointed into the Maori heartland just in case …

War soon broke out again, a blend of bitter hand-to-hand combats in the bush and all-out attacks on pas. The climax came at a pa called Orakau, where Rewi Maniapoto had built his fort in an orchard set in fields. General Cameron, the British commander, with 2,000 troops, shelled the pa and several times assaulted it without success. But the 300 men, women and children within ran out of water and had almost run out of ammunition. Some were using wooden bullets. Cameron urged them to surrender and they made a magnificent reply: “We will fight on for ever, for ever, for ever!”

Cameron then urged the women and children to come out, but they shouted that they would fight with their men. It was the third day of the siege, and that afternoon the survivors erupted from the pa, taking the soldiers by surprise. Half the gallant force escaped.

The British decided that they had never met finer native foes, and put up a memorial to the fallen in a church near the battlefield. The war petered out, though Kingi did not give himself up until 1872, and the final surrender came in 1881. The tragedy was that what had been a normal war now became a series of nightmare incidents, with Maori fanatics creating havoc. The British regulars had gone home and the settlers had to cope on their own. Unlike the regulars, they had no admiration for the Maoris. When all was over, the Maoris despaired. Much of their land was lost and they appeared to have lost the will to live. They seemed to be a dying race. Happily, as history tells, they were not.