bound.  Rauparaha landed, fired the village, and killed all he could catch.  Coming on board again, the victors feasted on the slain, Stewart looking on.  Human flesh was cooked in the brig’s coppers.  The entrapped chief was put in irons—­lent by Stewart.  Though manacled, he signed to his wife, whose hands were free, to kill their young daughter, a girl whose ominous name was Roimata (Tear-drops).  The woman did so, thus saving the child from a worse fate.  Returning to Cook’s Straits, Rauparaha and comrades went on shore.  A Sydney merchant, Mr. Montefiore, came on board the Elizabeth at Kapiti and saw the chief lying in irons.  As these had caused mortification to set in, Montefiore persuaded Stewart to have them taken off, but the unhappy captive was still held as a pledge until the flax was paid over.  It was paid over.  Then this British sea-captain gave up his security, who with his wife was tortured and killed, enduring his torments with the stoicism of a North American Indian.  The instrument of his death was a red-hot ramrod.

The Elizabeth, with thirty tons of flax in her hold, sailed to Sydney.  But Stewart’s exploit had been a little too outrageous, even for the South Pacific of those days.  He was arrested and tried by order of Governor Darling, who, it is only fair to say, did his best to have him hanged.  But, incredible as it seems, public sympathy was on the side of this pander to savages, this pimp to cannibals.  Witnesses were spirited away, and at length the prosecution was abandoned.  Soon after Stewart died at sea off Cape Horn.  One authority says that he dropped dead on the deck of the Elizabeth, and that his carcass, reeking with rum, was pitched overboard without ceremony.  Another writes that he was washed overboard by a breaking sea.  Either way the Akaroa chief had not so easy a death.

Next year, Rauparaha, whose revenge was nothing if not deliberate, organized a strong attack on Kaiapoi.  With complete secrecy he brought down his men from Cook’s Straits, and surprised his enemies peacefully digging in the potato grounds outside their stockade.  A wild rush took place.  Most of the Kaiapois escaped into the pa, shut the gate and repulsed a hasty assault.  Others fled southward, and skulking amid swamps and sand-hills got clear away, and roused their distant fellow-tribesmen.  A strong relieving force was got together, and marching to the beleaguered pa, slipped past Rauparaha and entered it at night, bending and creeping cautiously through flax and rushes as they waved in a violent wind.  But sorties were repulsed, and the garrison had to stand on the defensive.  Unlike most pas, theirs was well supplied with food and water, and was covered on three sides by swamps and a lagoon.  A gallant attempt made on a dark night to burn the besiegers’ canoes on the sea-beach was foiled by heavy rain.  At last Rauparaha, reaching the stockade by skilful sapping, piled up brushwood against it, albeit many