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Yet even these accepted the new teaching with eagerness. A curious evidence of this was given by a deputation which came one day to Opotiki from a village 30 miles in the interior. The object of these strangers was not blankets or powder, but simply to ask the white man whether the words of the burial service might be read over the unbaptised!
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.
Volkner was denounced as a spy, because he had travelled so often between Opotiki and Auckland. Nothing could be brought against Grace, except the old charge of taking away the Maori's land. "Neither Mr. Volkner nor I have any land," said the missionary. The Maoris seemed by this time somewhat ashamed of their barbarity, and Grace was allowed his liberty to go about the pa.
Nor were all friendly natives by any means as effective as the Wanganui and Ngatiporou, or all chiefs as serviceable as Ropata and Kemp. The east coast troubles began in March, 1865, with the murder at Opotiki, on the Bay of Plenty, of Mr. Volckner, a missionary and the most kindly and inoffensive of mankind.
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.
They were completely defeated, but in the hour of victory a ball struck John in the chest. He was buried at Wanganui with military honours, white men carrying their deliverer's body to the grave. In the same month a band of the fanatics reached Opotiki in the Bay of Plenty.
But it had Tamihana Waharoa with his model pa, and its graveyard contained the grave of Tarore, "who, being dead, yet spake." Her father, Ngakuku, did not indulge in useless grief, but in 1839 accompanied Wilson from Tauranga along the Bay of Plenty to Opotiki near its eastern end, and there they founded a station amid a people more savage than any yet encountered.
When the news of the Opotiki tragedy reached Auckland, a thrill of horror passed through the city. The sad duty of breaking the news to Mrs. Volkner was undertaken by Bishop Selwyn and Bishop Patteson, who had lately arrived from Melanesia. Her answer was worthy of a matron of the primitive Church: "Then he has won the Crown!" On the following Sunday a memorial sermon was preached at St.
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