United States or North Macedonia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
After much preliminary chanting of incantations and shouting of defiance, the Hau-Haus charged. As they came on, the friendly natives, more than half believing them to be invulnerable, fired so wildly that every shot missed. Three of the Wanganui leaders fell, and their line wavered and broke.
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.
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.
I think he has less refinement than any lunatic I have met. December 8. A couple of curious war-monuments here at Wanganui. One is in honor of white men "who fell in defence of law and order against fanaticism and barbarism." Fanaticism.
Then, on the plea of making a rapid tour of the outposts of the Colony, he organised a move on Wanganui. He went thither by sea, with a contingent of troops and a body-guard of leading Maori chiefs. 'These, Sir George smiled, 'had been vowing all sorts of handsome things to me, and I took them at their word.
A good body of signatures was appended from Taranaki, Wanganui, and Nelson; none from Wellington or the eastern district. The names of the brothers Williams, of course, do not appear, but some of the other missionaries were found willing to sign Kissling, Maunsell, Morgan, Ashwell, and Taylor. With this document the bishop sailed for Sydney, to attend the meeting of bishops already referred to.
Not merely that, but he aired his sister Topera, a woman of first-rate abilities, and of wide influence among the Maoris. Meanwhile, an outbreak at Wanganui furnished Sir George with material for his administrative wits. He was strolling up and down, deep in meditation, on a sort of terrace at his residence in Auckland.
By this agreement the harbours of Raglan and Kawhia, with the hinterland as far eastwards as the Waikato and Waipa rivers, were definitively included within the Wesleyan sphere of influence. Nothing was said about the coast to the southward, and there was nothing whatever to prevent the settlement of Hadfield at Waikanae and Otaki in 1839, nor that of Mason at Wanganui in 1840.
He did indeed appear with a force upon the coast north of Wanganui. But his principal feat was the extraordinary one of consuming fifty-seven days in a march of fifty-four miles along the sea beach, to which he clung with a tenacity which made the natives scornfully name him the Lame Seagull.
He was an artist, whose second wife and several children had been murdered by the Maoris near Wanganui during the Maori insurrection of the forties, and he had come to Adelaide with the three survivors. The massacre of that family was only one of the terrible tragedies of that time, but it was not the less shocking.
Word Of The Day