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Firearms.
One of the first steps towards the extinction of the Maoris was the acquisition of firearms. Two or three guns made a war-party practically invincible when the enemy was unprovided with these weapons. When the Maoris heard the report, and saw the warriors fall without apparently being struck, they thought that some of the atuas, or ancestral deities, had come down to join in the fight, and a wild panic and general stampede would ensue, when they would be butchered without resistance with the spear and mere. “We can fight against men,” they said, “but who can fight against the gods?”
The first recovrded instance of the use of the new weapon in Maori warfare was in the case of a small party of Ngapuhi who, with only two old flint-lock guns, made a raid down the west coast of the North Island in about 1818. After every battle they stopped to feast on the slain, and took care that no survivors were left to carry the alarm to the next settlement. About the same time another party of the same tribe made a similar expendition along the east coast as far as Tauranga. But these adventures were as nothing to those carried out a few years later by the great chief Hongi Ika, who about this time became head over the various branches of the Ngapuhi, who extended from the Bay of Islands to Hokianga.
Hongi was well acquainted with the ways of the pakeha, and had already witnessed the effect of his weapons. If he could only secure a sufficient supply of arms and ammunition he could make himself supreme ruler of the whole Maori race. He had helped to welcome the Rev. Samuel Marsden to the country, and had taken the infant mission settlement at Rangihoua under his protection; and when in 1820 one of that body—Mr. Thomas Kendal—proposed to go to England to help in bringing out a Maori dictionary and grammer, he volunteered to accompany him and assist him in the work. On his arrival Hongi was presented to King George IV, and made the acquaintance of a number of influential persons, who were greatly taken with his intelligence and his professed desire for the improvement of his people. His modest request for a bodyguard of twenty soldiers was discouraged, and his attempt to procure any quantity of weapons met with no success. The King, however, made him a present of a suit of armour, while the good people who credited his benevolent intentions gave him a
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number of ploughs, harrow, &c., to help him in his work of civilisation.
On reaching Sydney—at that time the distributing port for the colonies—he managed to exchange to his stock of agricultural implements for a number of muskets, which with others that his people had already acquired from the whalers in the Bay of Islands, brought his armoury up to three hundred pieces, with a proportionate amount of ammunition. Landing in New Zealand, he found his own people at war with the Natives of Hauraki, or Thames district, and here for the first time he tried the effect of his new weapons, when, after burning all the villages and killing hundreds on the field of battle, he brought two thousand prisoners home to the Bay of Islands.
This was in 1821, and for the next ten years Hongi kept the whole country in fire and bloodshed, making an expedition every year. If a tribe helped the people with whom he happened to be engaged that tribe would be the next to receive his attention. When preparing for a campaign he would hoist his flag—a red blanket—over his pa, and send messengers to the various subtribes in the neighbourhood; and should any of these have the hardihood to refuse to supply a contingent, they had to reckon with him on his return. In this way he successively raided the Thames, the Waikato, the Auckland district, Rotorua, Poverty Bay, Kaipara, &c., finishing with Whangaroa, where he received a shot through the lungs, which eventually caused his death. It is estimated that at least one-fourth of the total number of Maoris in New Zealand perished in these wars, and probably another fourth were swept away in the raids of Waharoa, Te Wherowhero, and Rauparaha, the latter of whom penetrated as far as Kaiapohia (Kaiapoi), in the middle of the South Island. When we reflect that the warriors engaged were the very flower of the Maori people, we can understand that the loss to the race was quite beyond numerical computation.