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Updated: September 28, 2025
From the middle of 1864, to January, 1865, there was so little fighting that it might have been thought that the war was nearing its end. The Waikato had been cleared, and the Tauranga tribes crushed. Thompson, hopeless of further struggling ceased to resist the irresistible, made his peace with us and during the short remainder of his life was treated as became an honourable foe.
In a sharp fight at Koheroa the natives were driven from their entrenchments with some loss, and any forward movement on their part was effectually stopped. But, thanks to what seemed to the colonists infuriating slowness, the advance up the Waikato was not begun until the latter part of October, and the conquest of the country not completed until February.
Four hundred Maories who were shut up in the fortress of Orakau, besieged by 1,000 English, under Brigadier-General Carey, without water or provisions, refused to surrender, but one day at noon cut their way through the then decimated 40th Regiment, and escaped to the marshes." "But," asked John Mangles, "did the submission of the Waikato district put an end to this sanguinary war?"
This rebuff drove him to action. Sending messages far and wide, he convened a great assembly of the inland tribes at Rangiaohia in the Waikato. The concourse afterwards moved to Ihumatao on the shores of the Manukau, and within a few miles of Auckland, where the conference was at that very time drafting the church constitution.
But they knew that they were trapped, and next day they surrendered, in all 183 men with a few women. Sixty or seventy of the Maoris had been killed, but several hundreds escaped. Orakau.# Meantime General Carey, who was next in command to General Cameron, had been chasing another large body of the Waikato tribe far up the river more than half way to its source in Lake Taupo.
"There is the Waikato!" cried Paganel, "and the road to Auckland is along its right bank." "We shall see that to-morrow," said the Major, "Let us camp here. It seems to me that that dark shadow is that of a little clump of trees grown expressly to shelter us. Let us have supper and then get some sleep." "Supper by all means," said Paganel, "but no fire; nothing but biscuit and dried meat.
Kai-Koumou was the only one of all the chiefs that obeyed the call of William Thompson, who had returned to the lake district, and he was the first to announce to his tribe the defeat of the national insurrection, beaten on the plains of the lower Waikato. Of the two hundred warriors who, under his orders, hastened to the defence of the soil, one hundred and fifty were missing on his return.
And yet the evil was in a way its own cure, for, through strenuous endeavours, by this time every tribe had a certain proportion of its men well armed with muskets; and thus no single tribe ever afterwards got the same cruel ascendancy that was obtained first by the Ngapuhi and then by the Waikato tribe.
The part of the northern island of New Zealand in which the natives had taken up arms, is a region of mountains, hills, and valleys, with lakes and streams, and several rivers of considerable size, the Thames and the Waikato being the largest.
They then ravaged the whole district, burning houses, crops, and fences; and all the settlers of Taranaki crowded for defence into the town of New Plymouth. Most of them were ruined, and many of them left for other colonies. Governor Browne now sent round from Auckland all the soldiers he had; but, in accordance with their agreement, the Waikato tribes sent warriors to assist the Taranaki tribe.
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