Lakes Rotorua and Taupo have no eels, yet the fresh-water fish furnished supplies throughout the year, sufficient being preserved to last between the seasons. The forests teemed with birds, which in turn had their seasons. Hence there were large tribes settled along the courses of the larger rivers, such as the Waikato, Waipa, Whanganui, Waitara, and others, whilst the larger lakes of Rotorua, Rotoiti, Taupo, and Waikaremoana supported large numbers upon their shores. As the forest is being cleared away, signs of terraced occupation are being revealed in inland parts concerning which traditional records are meagre or non-existent. Though many of these sites may have been temporary abiding-places for fishing and hunting purposes, and others again have not been continuously occupied, after making liberal allowances the signs of occupation point to the existence of a large population in pre-European days.

Some rough idea may be formed by comparing these past traces of occupation with the actual villages occupied in a district at the present time. Compare the numbers living at Orakei and Mangere with the number required to man either Maunga-kiekie (One Tree Hill) or Maungawhau (Mount Eden). This having been done, remember that there are none left to man some of the other forts that were occupied at the same time. The fighting Ngati-Tama, who manned and held the many strongholds of that stormy strip of Taranaki coast between the Mokau River and the White Cliffs, the “gateway of the west,” have dwindled down to a single scattered village of barely fifty souls; yet in their day they not only withstood the ceaseless onslaughts of the great Maniapoto and Waikato tribes, but conducted victorious campaigns to the north and to the south. Some of them live in conquered country to the south, but where are the people whom they dispossessed? North and south, cast and west, the same sad comparisons hold. There are stretches of coast with many magnificent pa, girt with fosses and rising strong and impressive with tier on tier of terraces, but with no modern villages nestling at their bases, and no living descendants of the old-time military engineers to recite the history of ancestral achievement. What proportion, then, shall we say existed in the numbers of the men of the past to the men of the present? Were they four times as many? They were at least that. Were they ten times as many? It does not seem improbable. With a present basis of 50,000 this would mean a pre-European population of from 200,000 to 500,000. We shall never know.

Whether the expressed view of some European writers that the diminution of the population had commenced before the advent of their own recent ancestors is in the nature of an excuse or not, we certainly know that the diminution was considerably accelerated after their arrival. The introduction of firearms by civilized traders altered the whole aspect of Maori warfare. What might almost be termed a manly physical exercise degenerated into killing expeditions to avenge old defeats and to acquire new territory. There were never such numbers slain of old as occurred after the acquisition of guns in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Archdeacon Walsh estimates that in the campaigns of Hongi Hika, Te Wherowhero, Te Waharoa, and Te Rauparaha, fully one-half of the population were killed. The introduction of epidemic and venereal diseases, and the abuse and misuse of European alcohol, foods, and clothing, all played their part in the decimation of the race. Influenced by the above causes, there was an added infant mortality. To aggravate the introduced wastage of Maori life were the unnecessary European wars of the “forties”