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Kororarika Burnt.# On 11th March, 1845, at daylight, Heke with 200 men crept up to the flagstaff, surprised the men in the house attached, and when twenty men came out of the lower block-house to help their friends on the top of the hill, he attacked them and drove them down to the town in the hollow beside the shore.
Behind Kororareka one of a series of hills overlooking the town is memorable as the site of the flagstaff, the cutting down of which by Heke was one of the first incidents of the Maori war. On March 11th, 1845, an attack was made upon the place before daylight, by three of the disaffected chiefs.
Heke was at a pah called Ikorangi; but Kawiti had 500 Maoris at a nearer pah called Ruapekapeka. Ruapekapeka.# Despard took his men sixteen miles in boats up a river; then nine miles through the forest, and on the 31st December he had 1,173 soldiers with 450 friendly natives in a camp 800 yards from the pah.
The intention was to assault from the rear, and he believed they would have been certain of the enemy, without incurring any considerable loss. The fall of Ruapekapeka brought peace to the northern half of New Zealand, and when the Governor visited Heke it was 'To explain to him that I was his friend, which he admitted.
All New Year's Day was spent in pouring in cannon balls by the hundred, but they did little harm. Next day the Maoris made a sally, but were driven back with the bayonet. Meantime, Heke came in one night with men to help his friend, and heavy firing on both sides was kept up for a week, after which two small breaches appeared near one of the corners of the palisades.
This gave a significance to the Wairau massacre that created quite a panic. Fresh settlers ceased to come; many that were there already now left. Those who had taken up farms far out in the country abandoned them and withdrew to the towns. Honi Heke.# And yet the great majority of the Maoris seem to have had no unfriendly purpose.
This wood was much used in the construction of the pahs which, in 1845, under the Maori chiefs Heke and Kawiti, long resisted the attacks of disciplined forces, aided by artillery. Returning to the road by a path which avoided the swamps our guide had taken us through, in little more than half an hour we reached Mr.
Yet Heke, lurking among the hills, contrived by a sudden dash to capture Lieutenant Philpott. However, after dealing courteously with him, he released him.
As Hakala could not pay the fine being already in debt to me for two months' wages paid in advance I settled it; for she was a widow, and had endeared herself to me by the vigorous manner in which she had pitched a large, fat girl named 'Heké out of the house for stealing some sugar from my store-room.
Here, too, was the theatre of the first war between Maoris and white men; here stood the flagstaff which Heke cut down; from these hills on the west the missionaries beheld the burning of Kororareka, whose smoke went up "like the smoke of a furnace." At the opening of the nineteenth century this important locality was occupied by the warlike and enterprising tribe of the Ngapuhi.
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