’Several chiefs had by this time gathered round, and we were all much touched by Wi Waka’s appeal.  I could only answer, “Yes, certainly!  You have done your duty nobly.”  He turned to the chiefs:  “Did you hear the Governor’s word?  I don’t care now if I die.”  Happily he recovered, but the incident showed the spirit of the man, and he was an example of the others.’

The English force, Sir George made the postscript, was to have assailed the ‘Bat’s-Nest’ on the Monday, the defences being much knocked about.  The intention was to assault from the rear, and he believed they would have been certain of the enemy, without incurring any considerable loss.  The fall of Ruapekapeka brought peace to the northern half of New Zealand, and when the Governor visited Heke it was ’To explain to him that I was his friend, which he admitted.’

Some of the folks in New Zealand blamed Sir George for being too indulgent towards revolted Maoris, fearing, ’In thanks they will raid Auckland some day, and massacre us all.’  A retired military officer, inclined to that view, was staying at Government House, Auckland, the night a fire destroyed it and Sir George’s earliest group of literary treasures.

‘When a shout went up, on the discovery of the fire,’ Sir George laughed in recollection, ’my guest fancied that his prophecy about the Maoris had come true.  He looked out of his bedroom window, saw Maoris about, and assured himself that an attack on us had begun.  He barricaded his door with a chest of drawers, the chairs, whatever he could lay hands on.  Being a man of military training he prepared for a desperate siege, and this so effectively, that I believe he had, on learning the real state of matters, to escape the fire by crawling through the window.

Afterwards, the Governor had a critic the fewer, of his olive branch to the Maoris.

X ’TWIXT NIGHT AND MORN

Night and morning in the far south were vividly reflected to Sir George Grey in tales of Rauparaha and Rangihaeta, Maori chieftains, and of Siapo, Loyalty Islander.

Before his arrival in New Zealand, the Maoris had been divorced from their cannibal practices.  Yet, the horrid traffic was not remote, if he were to accept a lasting rumour of Rauparaha and Rangihaeta.  The pair were making their own war stir for him, and must be tackled.  It was earlier that, sitting on a hillside in friendly converse, they sent a slave girl for a pail of water.  As she tripped off to do their bidding, Rauparaha, the story was, shot her through the back for a meal.  No doubt cannibalism among the Maoris had thriven on the absence of animal meat, for New Zealand was peculiar in that respect.  Its one large creature of the lower world was the moa, of which Sir George said ’It was akin to the ostrich, but no European, I believe, ever saw it alive.’