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Then it is pleasant to remember that Rauparaha's son became a missionary amongst the tribes which his father had harried, and that it is now nearly a generation since Maori blood was shed in conflict on New Zealand soil. "Under his office treason was no crime; The sons of Belial had a glorious time." Dryden. Between 1830 and 1840, then, New Zealand had drifted into a new phase of existence.
More than once he was defeated, and once his much-provoked foes attacked Kapiti with a united flotilla. But though they "covered the sea with their canoes," they parleyed after landing when they should have fought. By a union of astuteness and hard fighting Rauparaha's people won, and signal was the revenge taken on his assailants.
He elected to continue my prisoner, and other chiefs became bail for him when I did let him go. 'Rauparaha's defence was that he intended no harm, and that he was not in the plot, for he admitted there was a plot. I asked him why, if he meant no harm, he did not tell me that all these men had come so near.
Forming his camp on an islet in the Otaki River, and taking up a bold attitude, he endeavoured to secure the assistance of the Ngatiraukawa tribesmen. But Hadfield had followed him along the coast, and now brought his great influence to bear on the natives as they were gathered on the river bank. Rauparaha's passionate eloquence failed of its effect, and he saw that the game was lost.
That would have been to wait for too much proof of the plot; and my information satisfied me. I had a picked force put on board a man-of-war lying at Wellington, and with it, and another small vessel, we set out for Rauparaha's country. Besides myself, only three or four of the officers, I suppose, knew the nature of our mission.
There he agreed to become Rauparaha's instrument to carry out one of the most diabolical acts of vengeance in even Maori annals. The appearance of Stewart, ripe for any villainy, gave the Kapiti chief the chance he was waiting for.
Rauparaha himself was an "enquirer" into the Christian verities; Rauparaha's son had evangelised along the line which he himself was about to travel, and, moreover, was willing to proceed thither again with the bishop as his guide and companion. With the same Tamihana, then, and nine other Maoris, the bishop left Wellington on January 6th, 1844, in a miserable coasting schooner.
The most famous and far-reaching of Rauparaha's raids were among the Ngaitahu, whose scattered bands were masters of nearly all the wide half-empty spaces of the South Island. In one of their districts was found the famous greenstone.
The latter declared his enmity; he plundered and sometimes killed the settlers; and when soldiers were sent round to keep him in order he surprised and killed some of them. But Rauparaha pretended to be friendly, though the Governor well knew he was the ringleader in the mischief. Grey quietly sent a ship, which by night landed 130 soldiers just in front of Rauparaha's house on the shore.
Governor Fitzroy began at his first levee at Wellington by scolding the settlers, inveighing against the local newspaper, and grossly insulting Gibbon Wakefield's son when he was presented to him. At Nelson he rated the magistrates after such a fashion that they threw up their commissions. He then went to Rauparaha's pa at Waikanae near Kapiti.
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