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Updated: May 10, 2025
It was in the Uriwera wilderness that Te Kooti lost his congenially bloodthirsty crony Kereopa, who was caught there and hung. Left almost without followers, he himself at last took refuge in the King Country, where he stayed quiet and unmolested. In the end he received a pardon, and died in peace after living for some twenty years after his hunters had abandoned their chase.
With strange inconsistency his executioners continued shaking hands with him until the moment when he was hoisted up. An outburst of demoniac savagery followed on the cutting down of the martyr's body. The head was severed from the trunk, and the blood was greedily drunk even by some of the friends of the victim. The Taranaki leader, Kereopa, forced out the eyes and swallowed them.
A force of militia soon dealt out condign punishment for these misdeeds, but meanwhile Kereopa and his fellow fire-brands had passed down the coast and kindled a flame which gradually crept southward even to Hawkes Bay. In village after village the fire blazed up, and a rising equal to that in the Waikato seemed imminent.
At the bidding of Kereopa, a Hau-Hau emissary, the missionary's people suddenly turned on him, hung him, hacked his body to pieces, and smeared themselves with his blood. At another spot in the same Bay a trading schooner was seized just afterwards by order of another Hau-Hau fanatic, and all on board killed save two half-caste boys.
Spreading from point to point, dying down and then starting up, it was as hard to put out as fire abroad in the fern. The amiable Kereopa visited Poverty Bay, three days' journey south of the Waiapu, and tried hard to persuade the natives to murder Bishop Williams, the translator of the Scriptures into Maori.
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.
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