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Updated: April 30, 2025
In the wars of Te Waharoa, the mission-stations of Rotorua and Matamata were stripped, but no blood was shed. The Wesleyans set up again at Hokianga. Everywhere the teachers were allowed to preach, to intercede, to protest.
Of Hongi's antagonists none were more stubborn or successful than Te Waharoa, a fighting chief whose long life of warfare contains in it many stirring episodes of his times. Born in 1773 in a village near the upper Thames, he owed his life, when two years old, to a spasm of pity in the heart of a victorious chief from the Hot Lakes.
But the victim was a chief of high rank and nearly related to Waharoa. It was incumbent therefore upon that redoubtable warrior to obtain utu for the slaughter of his relative. He was still a heathen, and was deaf to the exhortations of the Christians. "How sweet," he said, "will taste the flesh of the Rotoruas along with their new kumeras!"
The Waikatos sent an embassy to all the other tribes, urging them to join and drive the white men out of the country. Te Waharoa was chosen to command in a grand attack at Auckland, and for that purpose the Maoris in two columns moved stealthily through the forest down the Waikato valley towards the town, threatening to massacre every white man in it.
Like Waharoa and Hongi he was small, spare and sinewy; an active man even after three-score years and ten. In repose his aquiline features were placid and his manners dignified. But in excitement, his small, keen, deep-sunken eyes glared like a wild beast's, and an overhanging upper lip curled back over long teeth which suggested to colonists his enemies the fangs of a wolf.
When at last their persecutors the Ngapuhi and Te Waharoa met over their bodies, Te Waharoa's astuteness and nerve were a match for the invaders from the north. In vain the Ngapuhi besiegers tried to lure him out from behind the massive palisades of Mata-mata, where, well-provisioned, he lay sheltered from their bullets.
The most intelligent of the chiefs, without at all understanding the truths of Christianity, were at once attracted by these signs of mechanical and intellectual superiority. We have seen how much the mission was indebted to the three great generals of New Zealand Hongi in the north, Waharoa in the centre, and Rauparaha in the south for the main steps of its advance.
From one raid on Rotorua his men came back with the bodies of sixty enemies cut off in an ambush. Not once did Waharoa meet defeat; and when, in 1839, he died, he was as full of fame as of years. Long afterwards his mana was still a halo round the head of his son Wiremu Tamihana, whom we shall meet in due time as William Thompson the king-maker, best of his race.
But General Pratt having arrived from Sydney with fresh soldiers, and prepared to sap the pahs and blow them up, the Maoris became afraid, and Te Waharoa proposed that peace should be made, which was done in May, 1861. Second Maori War.# Governor Browne then called upon the Waikato tribes, who were then in arms, to make submission and take the oath of obedience to the Queen's laws.
Williams and his colleagues meanwhile journeyed back into the Thames Valley, and, after promising Waharoa to send him a teacher as soon as possible, passed on to the Bay of Plenty. At Tauranga a large gathering of the inhabitants was held. They had evidently not forgotten the efforts which had been made four years before by Henry Williams to save their settlement from the wrath of the Ngapuhi.
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