Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/262

238 hundred men for the attack. They shelled the pah all day with heavy guns, and about 4 tried to carry it by assault. They got inside the pah, and there the soldiers were taken by panic, and retreated in disorder, leaving the Maoris in possession, though they evacuated the place in the night. The English lost twenty-seven killed and sixty-six wounded, and among the dead there were eleven officers.

"We went through the ruins of the pah, and could not understand how the Maoris were able to stay there in all the rain of shot and shell that was poured in before the assault. There is a monument at Tauranga to commemorate the event, and an English resident showed us the little cemetery where those who fell at the Gate Pah were buried. It is quite close to the sea, and, like English cemeteries generally, is carefully tended and kept in order.

"Perhaps you would like to know something of the Maori war, as we have had occasion to mention it two or three times. Well, there was trouble between the natives and the English a few years after the establishment of the Government at Auckland; it grew out of the imposition of customs duties and the purchase of land, and the natives thought they had not been treated properly. There was a good deal of fighting on a small scale; but after a while peace was established, and it lasted practically for ten or twelve years.

"But in March, 1860, there were fresh troubles, and from the same cause as before, or rather from one of the causes, the sale of land. The Government had bought some land, for which they paid the man who claimed to own it; after he had been paid the tribe claimed it, and because the Government would not pay a second time the tribe declared war. It was joined by other tribes, and in a very short time a considerable number of Maori tribes were in full insurrection against the military authority. Bishop Selwyn and others thought the natives had been unjustly treated, and there was much dissension among the Europeans as to the right and wrong of the matter.

"The war lasted through 1860, and down to March, 1861, when the natives, having been several times defeated, ended the trouble by surrendering. Soon after this the Maoris thought they would have a king of their own, and representatives of some of the tribes assembled and proclaimed a native sovereignty. Previously to this they had formed a league which opposed the sale of land to the white strangers, and this league was entered into by a good many tribes. The movement for a king was based on the belief that, as the English had a queen, the Maoris could have a similar ruler, and so in 1862 a king was chosen.