Kimble [Kimball] Bent, An Unusual European Who Deserted The British Army And Joined The Hau Hau's #2

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

Kimble [Kimball] Bent part 2

A portrait of Kimble Bent taken when he was interviewed by James Cowan in the 1900s

So opened Kimble Bent's life in the new land, the land in which he was to roam the forests an outlaw for more than a decade.

In those war-days of 1860–70 dense forests covered the wide plains of this Taranaki province, where now most of the dark old woods have been hewn away, and have given place to the pastures and homesteads of dairy farmers.

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It was a wild but beautiful land.

The coast curved out and round in a great sweeping semicircle from Waitara in the north to Wanganui in the south, the intervening region of forest, hill, and plain was the theatre of war.

High and central, Taranaki's great mountain-cone, which the pakeha [europeans] calls Egmont, swelled to a height of over 8,000 feet, it's base hidden in the forests, its snowy peak glittering far above the broad soft swathes of clouds, the sailor's landmark a hundred miles out at sea.

Remote from all other high mountains it soared aloft, “lonely as God and white as a winter morn,” as Joaquin Miller wrote of his beloved Mount Shasta.

On all sides, Taranaki, the holy mountain of the Maoris, sloped evenly and gently to the plains, and from its recesses sprang the headwaters of many a beautiful river.

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The mountain, huge yet exquisitely symmetrical, was revered by the old-school Taranaki Maori as the mighty symbol of his nationality and regarded as being in some mystic fashion the source of his tribal mana.[power]

Under the shadow of Taranaki began the Ten Years' War, here the Hau hau fanaticism took its mad rise in 1864.

From Taranaki's foot set out the Hauhau apostles, preaching a strange jumble of Scriptural expressions and pagan Maori concepts, promising their converts that no pakeha bullet should harm them if they but repeated their magic incantations, and brandishing before the ranks of their devotees the dried and smoked heads of slain white soldiers.

The relapse into barbarism was more marked in Taranaki than anywhere else, and even to this day [the 1900s] the hatred of the white man lingers there, amongst the remnants of the old Hauhau stock.

Te Whiti, the Prophet of Parihaka, until his death in 1907, held his court under the shadow of lofty Taranaki and preached his old mysticism fortified by the towering presence of his mountain-god, cold and immutable, and all unmindful of the pakeha's march through the plains below.

In March 1864, the 57th were ordered from New Plymouth to Manawapou (not far from the present town of Hawera), near the Tangahoé River.

The fanatic Hauhau faith had just been born amongst the Maoris, whose palisaded pas [villages] dotted the outskirts of the great forests on the farther side of the Tangahoé, and whose war-songs could sometimes be heard from the white soldiers' camp.

At Manawapou the regiment went under canvas, and now began the regular round of sentry-go and outpost duty, and all the preparations for an advance on the rebel positions.

Meantime there was fighting in the northern and western parts of the Taranaki province, between the 57ths camp and New Plymouth.

There was the disastrous affair at Te Ahuahu, where Captain Lloyd and several soldiers were killed, their heads were cut off and smoke-dried by the Hauhau savages, and were carried away to distant tribes by Kereopa, Patara, and other rebel emissaries, the Hauhau recruiting officers.

Another momentous affair which happened soon after the 57th took post at Manawapou was the desperate assault on the British redoubt at Sentry Hill (Te Morere).

A large force of Hauhau warriors, deluded by their prophet Hepanaia into believing that his incantations rendered them invulnerable to the white man's bullets, rushed against the redoubt in open daylight one morning, but were beaten off, leaving some fifty of their number lying dead in front of the fort.

It was in this engagement that Titokowaru, who was afterwards Kimble Bent's chief and master, lost one of his eyes through a bullet wound.

Kimble Bent's final revolt against constituted authority came one wet, cold day in the Manawapou camp in April 1864.

It was pouring with rain, but a corporal, one who took a vindictive sort of pleasure in asserting his authority over those privates whom he happened to dislike, ordered Bent to go out and cut some firewood in the bush.

Irritated by the manner in which the order was given, the young “Down-Easter” was foolish enough to argue with his enemy the corporal.

“Look here,” he said, “this is no day to send a man out cutting wood.

The officers can stay in their tents laughing at us fellows out in the rain. We're treated like a set of blessed dogs.”

“Oh, you won't go, won't you?” sneered the corporal, rejoicing at having irritated the soldier into insubordination.

“No, I won't go,” said Bent defiantly; “so you can do what you like about it.”

The corporal reported Bent to his immediate superiors, and the soldier was arrested and lodged in the guard-tent.

Next morning he was brought before a court-martial and tried for disobedience of orders.

Major Haszard was the president of the court.

With him sat Captain Clark, Lieutenant Brown, and Ensign Parker.

Bent knew it was useless to attempt a defence, for his offence was an inexcusable breach of discipline.

He was found guilty, and the sentence of the court was that he should receive fifty lashes, and serve two years in gaol.

The triangles were then a familiar institution in every military camp in the Waikato and in Taranaki; for those were flogging days, when even slight breaches of military rules brought down the lash upon the soldier's back.

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One of the regimental surgeons, Dr Andrews, examined Bent, as was the practice before flogging was inflicted, and he reported that in his opinion the young soldier was not constitutionally fit to endure the fifty lashes ordered.

Soon after Bent had been taken to his tent under guard, one of the officers of the court-martial came in to see him.

This was Captain Clark, a fine jovial young Canadian-born soldier, who had rather a liking for the unfortunate man from his end of the world.

“Cheer up, Bent,” he said; “you'll only get twenty-five, the sentence is reduced.

And put that in your mouth when you go to the triangles,” and he threw down a sixpence.

Then, when the guard-tent corporal was not looking, the kindly officer took a flask of rum from his breast-pocket, laid it on the tent floor, and walked away to his quarters.

When Bent was called out for punishment, he quickly drank off the rum and put the sixpence in his mouth.

He knew the old soldier's recipe for a “stiff upper lip” in the agony of flogging, “bite on the bullet.”

The sixpence would serve him as well. It would keep his teeth from biting through his tongue in the throes of that horrible punishment.

A bugle sounded the “Fall in.” No. 8 Company was paraded in review order on the drill ground to “witness the punishment.”

Bent was marched down to the square, he was stripped to the waist and tied to the triangles.

The big drummer of the Company stepped to the front; he was the flagellant.

Bent bit on his substitute for a bullet as the cat swished through the air and fell like a red hot knife on his quivering back.

Again and again came the frightful cuts, criss-cross upon his back and shoulders, till the tale of twenty-five was complete.

Then the prisoner was cast loose, swearing in his pain and passion to have the drummer's life.

A blanket was thrown across his raw and bleeding shoulders, and he was marched back to the guard-tent, where the surgeon prescribed for him in rough-and-ready fashion; then to prison, he refused to go into the camp hospital.

Bent served some months in Wellington Prison, doing cook-house work, in expiation of his offence against military discipline.

Then he was sent back to his hated regiment.

The shame of that morning at the triangles, with his comrades paraded to witness his disgrace and agony, was burned into him forever.

He grew morose and desperate.

At last, he resolved to desert to the enemy.

He confided his resolve to his tent-mates, and they, knowing that other soldiers had deserted to the Maoris and had not been killed, did not attempt to dissuade him.

“I can't be worse off with the Maoris than I am here,” he told them; “if they do tomahawk me, it will end all my troubles. I don't very much care.”

So he bided his time for a favourable opportunity to steal from the camp, and soon his chance came.

It was on June 12, 1865, that he broke camp and fell in with the Hauhau scout on the banks of the Tangahoe.
Ngati Ruanui Chief, Tito Hanataua, was riding his horse along a track near the bank of the Tangahoe River.

He was there to scout a nearby British Army fort.

To his astonishment, he came face to face with a soldier wearing a dripping wet scarlet uniform.

Their conversation went like this.

Tito Hanataua:
Here you Pākehā! Go back quick! Haere atu, haere atu, Go away back to the soldiers. I shoot you suppose you no go
Hoki atu

Kimble Bent:
Shoot away, I won’t go back. I’m running away from the soldiers. I want to go to the Māoris. Take me with you

Tito Hanataua:
You tangata kuware You Pākehā fool, go back The Māori kill you, my word You look out

Kimble Bent:
I don’t care if they do, I tell you I want to live with the hauhaus.

Tito Hanataua:
E pai ana (it is well). All right, you come along. But you look out for my tribe - they kill you.

The saturnine Hauhau spoke little to the white man during that journey to the rebel camp.

He stalked silently on in front, his rifle over his shoulder, turning quickly now and again to assure himself that the soldier was still following him.

Presently they forded another stream, which Bent afterwards came to know as the Ingahape, and passed through a deserted settlement, with its tumble-down dwellings of raupo reeds, and its old potato-gardens.

A few minutes later they came in sight of their destination, the Ohangai pa.

A high stockade of tree-trunks sunk in the ground, some of the upper ends hewn into sharp points, others with round knobby tops that suggested impaled human heads, surrounded a populous village of thatched huts.

Just beyond it was the bush, stretching away as far as the eye could carry.

It was a secluded, pretty scene, that village with its neat enclosure, its rows of snug whares [houses] which could be seen through the gateway and the openings in the palisade, and its squares of maize and potato cultivations, sheltered by the friendly belt of dark green forest.

Some little, nearly naked children were playing about on the open space in front of the Palisades.

When they suddenly beheld a white man riding along towards them, with a Maori walking by his stirrup, they stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed, and then rushed helter-skelter into the pa, calling out at the top of their voices,
He pakeha, he pakeha

What a commotion that cry of “Pakeha” aroused in the slumbering pa

Men leapt from the flax whariki (mats), where they had been drowsing away the afternoon awaiting the opening of the steam ovens, and poured out of the narrow gateway armed with their guns and tomahawks.

When they saw that the European was a harmless, unarmed individual and that he was apparently the prisoner of one of their own people, the clamour died away, and they escorted the soldier and his captor into the pa.

Bent quickly perceived that his companion was a man of some importance, from the peremptory orders he issued and the alacrity with which they were obeyed.

The scout was, in fact, the chief Tito te Hanataua, a rangatira [chief] of high standing in the Ngati-Ruanui tribe, and one of the Hauhaus best fighting-leaders.

It was a wild scene that met the young soldier's gaze when he entered the stockade, and his heart sank before the savagely hostile gaze of a crowd of armed, half-stripped warriors, the black-bearded and shaggy-headed men of the bush, and their scarcely less savage-looking women.

A strange ceremony began.

In the centre of the village square or marae stood a rough-hewn pole or flagstaff, about fifteen feet high, on which flew one or two coloured flags.

This was the Niu, the sacred staff which the Hauhau prophet Te Ua had commanded his followers to erect as a pole of worship in each of their villages.

[The Niu was in more ancient times the name of a peculiar ceremony of divination often resorted to by the tohungas or priests, it is perhaps worth noting, too, that in the Islands of Polynesia, the traditional Maori Hawaiki, it is the general name for the coco-nut-tree.]

All the inhabitants of the village, men, women, and children, formed up, and began to march round and round the Niu, with a priest in their midst, rushing frantically to and fro, and brandishing a Maori weapon as he yelled a ferocious-sounding chant.

The people, too, lifted up their voices as they marched, and, after listening a while, Bent found to his astonishment that part of what they were chanting in a singular wild cadence were these words in “pidgin” English,

“Big river, long river, big mountain, long mountain, bush, big bush, long bush,” and so on, ending with a loudly chanted cry, “Rire, rire, hau”

This meaningless gibberish formed part of the incantations solemnly taught to the Hauhaus by Te Ua, who professed to have the “gift of tongues” of which the pakeha's New Testament spoke, his disciples fondly believed that they were endowed by their prophet's “angel” with wonderful linguistic powers.

The singular march suddenly ceased, at an order from the shawl-kilted tohunga in the centre, and then the people filed into the village meeting-house, a large raupo-reed-built structure, taking Bent with them.

He was motioned to a seat beside a Maori, whose name, he afterwards found, was Hori Kerei (George Grey),[probably named after Governor George Grey, Governor of New Zealand 1845 to 1853, and again in 1860 to 1868] and who could speak English fairly well.

Sitting opposite Bent was a white-bearded old fighting-man, a dour-faced savage, his brown face deeply scored with the marks of blue-black tattoo, his sole attire was a blanket, in his right hand, and partly concealed by the blanket, he held a tomahawk.

His hand twitched now and then as if he were about to flash out the tomahawk and use it on the pakeha, from whose face he never withdrew his fierce old eyes.

He was the chief, Te Rangi-tutaki.

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