of the Hawkes Bay Province, killed seven whites, fooled the occupants of a Native pa into opening their gates to him, and then massacred 57 of them.  But the collapse of the insurrection on the West Coast enabled attention to be concentrated upon the marauder.  He fell back on the plateau round Lake Taupo.  There, in June, 1869, he outwitted a party of militia-men by making his men enter their camp, pretending to be friendlies.  When the befooled troopers saw the trick and tried to seize their arms, nine were cut down.  McDonnell, however, was at the heels of the Hau Haus, and in three encounters in the Taupo region Te Kooti was soundly beaten with a loss of 50 killed.  He became a hunted fugitive.  Ropata and Kemp chased him from district to district, backwards and forwards, across and about the island, for a high price had been put on his head.  For three years the pursuit was urged or renewed.  Every band Te Kooti got together was scattered.  His wife was taken; once he himself was shot in the hand; again and again the hunters were within a few yards of their game.  Crossing snow-clad ranges, wading up the beds of mountain torrents, hacking paths through the tangled forest, they were ever on his track, only to miss him.  It was in the Uriwera wilderness that Te Kooti lost his congenially bloodthirsty crony Kereopa, who was caught there and hung.  Left almost without followers, he himself at last took refuge in the King Country, where he stayed quiet and unmolested.  In the end he received a pardon, and died in peace after living for some twenty years after his hunters had abandoned their chase.

Colonel Whitmore, crossing to the Wanganui district after the fall of Ngatapa, had set off to deal with Titokowaru.  He, however, threw up the game and fled to the interior, where he was wisely left alone, and, except for the fruitless pursuit of Te Kooti, the year 1870 may be marked as the end of warfare in New Zealand.

The interest of the Maori struggle, thus concluded, does not spring from the numbers engaged.  To a European eye the combats were in point of size mere battles of the frogs and mice.  What gave them interest was their peculiar and picturesque setting, the local difficulties to be met, and the boldness, rising at moments to heroism, with which clusters of badly armed savages met again and again the finest fighting men of Europe.  It was the race conflict which gave dignity to what Lieutenant Gudgeon in his chronicle truthfully reduces to “expeditions and skirmishes grandiloquently styled campaigns”.  Out of a multitude of fights between 1843 and 1870, thirty-seven (exclusive of the raid on Poverty Bay, which was a massacre) may be classed as of greater importance than the rest.  Out of these we were unmistakably beaten nine times, and a tenth encounter, that of Okaihau, was indecisive.  Of twenty-seven victories, however, those of Rangi-riri and Orakau were dearly bought; in the double fight at Nukumaru we lost more than the enemy, and at Waireka most of our forces retreated, and only heard of the success from a distance.  Two disasters and six successes were wholly or almost wholly the work of native auxiliaries.  The cleverness and daring of the Maori also scored in the repeated escapes of batches of prisoners.