lives were not worth a month’s purchase.  Men and women toiled almost frantically at growing and preparing flax or providing anything exchangeable for muskets, powder and lead.  An old Brown Bess was worth three tons of scraped flax.  Undoubtedly whites were welcomed, both as traders and fighters, with a readiness unknown before.  In 1835, New Zealand exports to Sydney alone were valued at L113,000, her imports at L31,000.  It was a poor set-off against an era of butchery.

Determined to carry out the threats he had made in Sydney, Hongi began his campaigns by sailing southward with a great fleet of war-canoes.  Passing to the head of the Hauraki Gulf he sat down before the pa of Totara, the chief fortress of the Thames tribes—­the men whom he had doomed in Sydney.  The place was well garrisoned, and commanded by the head chief, Trembling-Leaf.  Even the three hundred musketeers found the pa too strong for open assault, though those inside had but one gun and no ammunition.  Hongi fell back upon fraud and offered honourable peace, if a certain sacred greenstone mere were handed to him as a trophy.  It was solemnly handed over, and the principal invaders were feasted in the pa.  One of them, ashamed of the intended treachery, whispered to an acquaintance in the garrison, “Beware!” In vain.  That night, as Hongi’s victims were sleeping securely, the Ngapuhi rushed the stockade and all within were killed or taken.  The dead were variously reckoned at from two hundred to a thousand.  One division of the Ngapuhi were sufficiently disgusted at Hongi’s deceit to refuse to join in the surprise, and Waikato, the powerful chief who had accompanied him to England, declared he would go afield with him no more.  Even his own special clan, though they had yielded to the furious exhortations of his blind wife Kiri, an Amazon who followed him in all his fights, urged him to spare some of the captives of rank.  The pitiless victor spared none.  Five he killed with his own spear.  The death songs of two have been preserved and are quoted as choice specimens of Maori poetry.

Between 1821 and 1827 Hongi carried fire and sword into almost every corner of what is now the Province of Auckland.  At first none could stand before him.  He assailed in 1822 two large pas near where the suburbs of Auckland city now spread.  In vain the terrified inmates tried to buy off the savage with presents.  Nearly all were slaughtered or taken, and Hongi left naught in their villages but bones, with such flesh on them “as even his dogs had not required.”  He invaded the Waikato and penetrated to a famous pa—­a triple stockade at Mataki-taki (Look-out).  To get there he dragged his war-canoes overland across the Auckland isthmus, straightened winding creeks for their passage, and, when the Waikatos felled large trees across one channel, patiently spent two months in cutting through the trunks.  At length the Look-out fortress was stormed with horrible slaughter.