Less well known than the fate of the Boyd is the cutting-off of the brig Hawes in the Bay of Plenty in 1829.  It is worth relating, if only because it shows that the Maoris were not always the provoked party in these affairs, and that, moreover, vengeance, even in No Man’s Land, did not always fall only on the guiltless.  In exchange for fire-arms and gunpowder the captain had filled his brig with flax and pigs.  He had sailed out to Whale Island in the Bay, and by a boiling spring on the islet’s beach was engaged with some of his men in killing and scalding the pigs and converting them into salt pork.  Suddenly the amazed trader saw the canoes of his friendly customers of the week before, headed by their chief “Lizard,” sweep round and attack the Hawes.  The seamen, still on board, ran up the rigging, where they were shot.  The captain, with those on the islet, rowed away for their lives.  The brig was gutted and burnt.  The Maoris, perplexed by finding a number of bags of the unknown substance flour, emptied the contents into the sea, keeping the bags.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Judge Wilson’s Story of Te Waharoa.]

Certain white traders in the Bay of Islands resolved to bring “Lizard” to justice, in other words to shoot him.  They commissioned a schooner, the New Zealander, to go down to the scene of the outrage.  A friendly Bay of Islands chief offered to do the rest.  He went with the schooner.  On its arrival the unsuspecting “Lizard” came off to trade.  At the end of a friendly visit he was stepping into his canoe when his unofficially appointed executioner stepped quietly forward, levelled his double-barrelled gun, and shot “Lizard” dead.

As a matter of course the affair did not end there:  “Lizard’s” tribe were bound in honour to retaliate.  But upon whom?  The Pakehas who had caused their chiefs death were far out of reach in the north.  Still they were not the only Pakehas in the land.  In quite a different direction, in the harbour which Captain Cook had dubbed Hicks’s Bay, lived two inoffensive Whites who had not even heard of “Lizard’s” death.  What of that?  They were Whites, and therefore of the same tribe as the Pakehas concerned!  So the village in which they lived was stormed, one White killed at once, the other captured.  As the latter stood awaiting execution and consumption, by an extraordinary stroke of fortune a whaling ship ran into the bay.  The adroit captive offered, if his life were spared, to decoy his countrymen on shore, so that they could be massacred.  The bargain was cheerfully struck; and when an armed boat’s crew came rowing to land, the Pakeha, escorted to the seaside by a murderous and expectant throng, stood on a rock and addressed the seamen in English.  What he told them to do, however, was to get ready and shoot his captors directly he dived from the rock into the water.  Accordingly his plunge was followed by a volley.  The survivors of the outwitted Maoris turned and fled, and the clever Pakeha was picked up and carried safely on board.