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Grace had done his family from Taupo. The two missionaries returned in a schooner on the first of March to Opotiki, bringing food and medicines for the sick and starving people. Their vessel was descried just at the time when the Hauhaus were indulging in one of their wild orgiastic dances. Their leader, Kereopa, announced that their god demanded a victim.
Report said that he had been carried off to Poverty Bay by the Hauhaus, who intended to attack Bishop Williams at Waerenga-a-hika. To Poverty Bay, accordingly, the warship was directed, and there too a critical situation was found. A small army of 400 Maoris was drawn up in battle array to defend the bishop, but their minds were divided, and their hearts were faint.
By the beginning of April all the converts in his immediate neighbourhood had succumbed to the mesmerism of the Hauhaus, and to the effects of a great tangi which they held over the desolation of their country. Accordingly, the bishop, with his family and other members of the mission, left the station on the third of the month and took their way northwards.
Such being the intensity of Te Kooti's feelings, it is not wonderful that he quickly won over the 300 disillusioned Hauhaus who were imprisoned with him on the island; nor that, when the two years were over without any word of release, they should have become restless and discontented.
Even the Hauhaus, though professing to abjure the white man's religion altogether, were dependent on the white man's book. "From the Bible," wrote Lady Martin, "which was their only literature, they got their phraseology.
The enemy sent four men to lie in ambush and kill him, but Hipango caught them, fed them, and sent them away unhurt. The next night ten men were sent for the same purpose; they too were caught, and they too were released. "I will not," said Hipango, "be the first to shed blood." Next day, Feb. 23rd, 1865, the Hauhaus came forward in open attack.
We have seen that Bishop Williams was driven from his home in 1865, and compelled to take refuge with his brother in the north. For seven years Waiapu was left without a synod, and, in one sense, it never received its bishop back at all. The Hauhaus held the adjoining pa, and the bishop's house was used as the fortress of the British troops.
Selwyn's exhortations had little effect, but he obtained the help of two loyal Maoris, who undertook to assist in Mr. Grace's rescue. The Eclipse sailed back to the Bay of Plenty, and anchored outside the bar at Opotiki. It was the sixteenth day of Grace's captivity, and the Hauhaus had agreed to exchange him for a Maori prisoner who was being kept at Tauranga.
But the Hauhaus were working themselves up in the Roman Catholic chapel to a devilish frenzy, and the noise of their shouting could be heard long after darkness had fallen. The missionaries passed a sleepless night, sustained only by the evening psalms and by one another's society. The morning of the second of March brought no relief to their anxiety.
The attention of the Hauhaus was turned first to the south; but, at Otaki, Hadfield's influence once more availed to save the settlement, and to block the road to Wellington. Some months later, however, a second attack was made on Wanganui, and the crisis brought out the magnificent heroism of another of Selwyn's old students, "John Williams" Hipango.
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