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When head winds checked the runaways, Te Kooti ordered an old man, his uncle, to be bound and thrown overboard as a sacrifice to the god of winds and storms. The unhappy human sacrifice struggled for awhile in the sea and then sank. At once the wind changed, the schooner lay her course, and the mana of Te Kooti grew great.
After taking all the provisions out of the place, Te Kooti set fire to the houses and retreated to the hills, where, on the top of a peak 2,000 feet high, he had made a pah called Ngatapa, which was defended on every side by precipices and deep gorges. There was only one narrow approach, and that had been fortified with immense care.
Te Kooti.# When the last of these pahs was captured an English officer declared that one of the friendly chiefs named Te Kooti was playing false and acting as a spy.
But Te Kooti himself escaped, and for the next two years he lived the life of a hunted animal, chased through the gloomy forests by the relentless Ropata. He fought many fights; his twenty Hau Hau followers were often near to death from starvation; but at length wearied out he threw himself on the mercy of the white men, was pardoned, sunk into obscurity, and died in peace.
Every band Te Kooti got together was scattered. His wife was taken; once he himself was shot in the hand; again and again the hunters were within a few yards of their game. Crossing snow-clad ranges, wading up the beds of mountain torrents, hacking paths through the tangled forest, they were ever on his track, only to miss him.
Fruitlessly the officer in charge of prisoners there had protested against being left with twenty men to control three hundred and thirty captives. The leader of these, Te Kooti, one of the ablest as well as most ferocious partisans the colonists ever had to face, had been deported from Poverty Bay to the Chathams two years before, without trial.
Thinking to do as Governor Grey had done with Rauparaha, this officer seized the chief, who, without trial of any sort, was sent off to the Chatham Islands, a lonely group 300 miles away, which New Zealand was now using as a penal establishment for prisoners. This conduct was quite unfair, as Te Kooti, so far as can now be known, was not a spy, and was friendly to the English.
It was during the months following, when he was pursued among the mountains, wounded and famished, that the savage reawoke in Te Kooti. In November, 1868, he and his men made a sudden onslaught upon the settlers of Poverty Bay, and massacred every man, woman, and child whom they met.
Nearly 300 Maoris were on the Chatham Islands, most of them Hau Hau prisoners. They were told that if they behaved well they would be allowed to return in two years. When two years were past and no signs of their liberation appeared, Te Kooti planned a bold escape.
The wonder is that when at last they overpowered their guards and took possession of the island, they should have acted with the moderation which they showed. They sailed back to New Zealand in a schooner which they had captured, and Te Kooti always averred that at that time he did not intend to interfere with anyone.
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