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Updated: May 26, 2025
Thither accordingly the bishop moved his family and his collegiate establishment in the spring of 1844. With part of the Whytehead bequest, he had bought several hundred acres of land at Tamaki, about six miles from the town, and not far from Mokoia, the scene of the great battle between Hongi and Hinaki.
On the site of the Mokoia pa, where Marsden had so often received the hospitality of Hinaki, they could see nothing but fern and fuchsia bushes, with here and there an axe-cloven skull. Proceeding down the Hauraki Gulf, the same scenes presented themselves, until at last a little smoke was noticed on the Coromandel coast.
Returning to his ship in the Thames estuary, he made more than one expedition to Kaipara and the more northern parts of the island, including places where no white man had hitherto been seen. In these journeys the Mokoia pa, which stood on the site of the present village of Panmure, near Auckland, became a kind of pivot of his operations.
Among these was Hinaki of Mokoia, who wished to continue his journey to England. They were still in the house when, in the following May, Hongi and Kendall arrived on their return journey. It was the month of the death of the great Napoleon at St. Helena, and it would almost seem as though a portion of his spirit had passed into the Maori chief on his passage through the Atlantic.
Hongi and Hinaki had become reconciled on the ship, but a new act of aggression soon called for reprisals, and at the head of an immense naval armament Hongi set out for the waters of the Waitemata. Clad in his helmet and coat of mail, he declaimed his wrongs before his enemy's stockade at Mokoia, and was only saved by his armour from sudden death by a treacherous bullet.
He began by defeating them on the Bay of Plenty, and thence turning inland found the tribe gathered in strength on the green island-hill of Mokoia, encircled by the Rotorua lake. Hongi's war-canoes were twenty-five miles away on the sea-beach, and the Mokoians ridiculed him as he lay encamped by the edge of their lake, unable to get at them.
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