Kimble [Kimball] Bent An Unusual European Who Deserted The British Army And Joined The Hau Hau #17

len.george (63)in #history • 5 years ago

The “Bird's-Beak” soon received its baptism of blood and fire.

Colonel McDonnell, with a force of about three hundred Armed Constabulary and volunteers, under Majors von Tempsky

and Hunter, attacked the pa [fortified village] on August 21, 1868.

The whites charged right into the village under heavy fire, and the Maoris fled to the bush, losing several killed.

Bent, fortunately for himself, was not in the pa, he had gone over to the Turangarere settlement, a few miles away, to procure gunpowder and paper for the manufacture of cartridges, and most of the other men were out cattle-shooting in the bush.

Titokowaru retired to his praying-house when the firing began and sat there muttering incantations, and it was only with great difficulty that he was persuaded by his people to leave the whare [house] and retire.

The great house was set fire to by Colonel McDonnell

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when the pa was captured, and the sacred whare-kura, where the high-priest had so often exhorted his people and with enchanted taiaha told off the warriors of the Tekau-ma-rua, was soon a mass of flames.

The Government troops lost four men killed and eight wounded in the engagement.

Most of these casualties occurred in the march back to Waihi, which became a heavy rear-guard action, for the main body of the Hauhaus came up in time to attack the troops briskly as they retired through the thick bush.

Then they drew off and returned to their half-demolished pa, to weep over their dead and the ashes of their great whare-kura and rebuild their ruined homes.

The troops had placed a number of hand-grenades,

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small shells filled with powder, in the thatch of the whares when they fired the village, but some of the houses were not destroyed, and on the return of the Hauhaus, they found some of these grenades unexploded.

The dangerous shells were given to Bent to handle.

He pulled out the fuses, which the Maoris called wiki, or wicks, and emptied the precious powder into flasks.

In this way, a sufficient quantity of powder to make eighteen gun-cartridges was obtained from each hand-grenade.

Early one warm spring afternoon in 1868, when the vast forest lay steeped in calm and Taranaki's sentry-peak rose like a great ivory tent out of the soft blue haze that bathed its spreading base, the sharp, cracking sound of rifle-shots broke the quiet of the wilderness.

The shots came from the mountainside of “The Beak-of-the-Bird,” the opposite one to that by which the white troops had advanced the previous month.

Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu was being taken in the rear this time.

Colonel McDonnell had set out from the Waihi Redoubt before daylight in the morning, with a force of about two hundred and sixty whites, composed of three divisions of Armed Constabulary (many of them ex-Forest Rangers), the newly joined Wellington Rifles and Rangers, and a few veteran volunteers, besides about a hundred Kupapas, the friendly Maoris from the Whanganui and Ngati-Apa tribes under Kepa te Rangihiwinui.

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Fording the swift Waingongoro River (the “Waters-of-Snoring”), the Colonel's force, guided by the woman Takiora, marched through the native village of Mawhitiwhiti, which was found deserted, then turned into the dense forest, searching for the Hauhau stronghold, which was now reported to be at Te Rua-ruru (“The Owl's Nest”), situated somewhere in the rear of Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu.

A disastrous search for it ended under the palisades of the “Bird's-Beak,” the savage beak that closed savagely on many a gallant pakeha before the sun went down in the western sea that day.

McDonnell had hoped by his early start to take the Hauhaus by surprise.

But wary old Titokowaru was seldom caught napping.

. . . . .

On the previous night, as the old warrior, Tutangé Waionui told, Titokowaru gathered all his men in the big house (wharé-kura), which had now been rebuilt.

Then, when the Hauhau prayers and chants were over, the chief arose and cried,

“E koro ma, kia tupato, He po kino te po, he ra kino te ra”

(“O friends, be on your guard, This is an evil night, a night of danger, and the morrow will be a day of danger”)

This oracular warning seemed to the superstitious people to be a message from the gods, of whom Titokowaru was the living medium.

That night was a night of preparation for battle.

Armed men slipped out along the trail in front of the stockade, and lay in wait for the expected enemy.

Long the grim old chief sat on his sacred mat that night in the wharé-kura, his enchanted tongue-pointed taiaha lying in front of him.

Karakia after karakia [song or chant] he recited in a low monotone, incantations and charms, ancient pagan and latter-day Hauhau karakia, for success in the conflict that he felt was to envelop his pa on the morrow in a ring of smoke and blood.

In his own little thatched whare, that day sat Kimble Bent, the pakeha-Maori.

He, too, was busy, squatting there on an old flax whariki mat.

By his side were a keg of gunpowder and a bag of bullets, and in front of him a pile of old pakeha newspapers and leaves torn from looted books.

He was making cartridges for the Hauhaus.

Round a wooden cartridge-filler he deftly rolled a scrap of paper, forming a cylinder, which he tied securely with thread or with fine strips of flax, then, withdrawing the filler, he poured in the gunpowder.

The cartridges loaded, he slipped them into the cartouche-boxes and holders, a number of which had been brought to the whare by the men of the Tekau-ma-rua, when the boxes were full, the remainder of the ammunition he stored carefully in a large flax basket.

Most of the receptacles for the ammunition, hamanu the Maoris called them, were primitive affairs smacking of the bush.

In size and shape, they resembled the ordinary military leather car-touche-boxes, but they were simply blocks of light wood, generally pukatea timber, slightly curved in shape so as to sit well on the body when strapped, and neatly bored with from ten to eighteen holes, each of which held a cartridge.

A flap of leather or skin, in the earlier days it was often a piece of tattooed human skin, covered the cartridges; and straps of leather or of dressed and ornamented flax were attached to the hamanu, which were buckled or tied around the waist or over the shoulders.

A well-equipped fighting-man usually wore two hamanu, by belts over the shoulders; and at his girdle, he carried his pouches for bullets and percussion-caps.

Such was the lone white man's occupation in the forest stockade that day before the looming battle.

Info From

The first of the below posts has a list of the previous posts of Maori Myths and Legends

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/how-war-was-declared-between-tainui-and-arawa

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-1

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-hatupatu-and-his-brothers

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/hatupatu-and-his-brothers-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-the-emigration-of-turi-an-ancestor-of-wanganui

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-continuing-legend-of-turi

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/turi-seeks-patea

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-manaia-and-why-he-emigrated-to-new-zealand