Kimble [Kimball] Bent An Unusual European Who Deserted The British Army And Joined The Hau Hau #34

len.george (63)in #history • 5 years ago

Kimble Bent lived in this securely hidden place of refuge, and at Paihau village, nearby, from the end of 1869 until about 1876.

He was now a Maori in all his ways, he planted food-crops and harvested them, snared birds, fished for eels, cut out canoes, and paddled his canoe on the river, joined the Hauhaus in their songs and their sacred chants, and danced with them in their hakas, he wore as little clothing as any native in the camp.

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Life did not go too easily with the white man during those days on the Waitara.

He was still Rupe's bondservant, and his master and owner sometimes took fits of ungovernable passion.

In one of these paroxysms of anger Bent had a narrow escape.

Rupe one day ordered his white man to go down to a creek, which ran into the Waitara near the Paihau pa and clear out the little dam in which the household were accustomed to steep their Indian corn, their kaanga-pirau.

Bent was working away cleaning out the steeping-pool when his chief came up and found fault with him because he was not working hard enough.

“I made him some answer which didn't please him,” says Bent, “whereupon he flew into a terrible rage and rushed at me like a tiger.

I stooped and caught him by the leg, and he fell into the muddy pool.

Up he jumped in a foaming passion, and ran to the pa, got out his gun, and loaded it to shoot me.

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But his wife rushed at him, took the gun out of his hands, and told me to hurry down to the other village, where I would be safe.

So I ran to the river-bank, loosed a small canoe, and paddled down the river to the lower pa, where I was kindly received and taken into my old friend Hakopa's house, and I lived and worked there for some months.”

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Another incident of those wild old days on the Waitara, narrated by Bent, is worth the telling, as an illustration of the whimsically variable temper of the Maori and of his truly Hibernian love of a “free fight.”

The war had long been over, and some hapus of the tribes on the upper river talked of selling their lands to the whites.

Certain of the chiefs had been down at Waitara township and in New Plymouth, and there they had been approached by the agents of the Government.

In the end, they sold their lands for eighteen pence an acre.

But the more conservative of the Hauhaus stoutly held out against land-selling, and against any dealings with the hated pakeha, and the difference of opinion led to frequent quarrels.

One day a council of the people was held on the marae of the Paihau village for the purpose of discussing the land-selling proposals.

Long and bitter were the speeches; speaker after speaker taki'd [strutted] up and down the marae [meeting ground] and worked himself up into a fury of excitement.

Two old chiefs, tattooed veterans of the war, their long hair adorned with feathers, weapons of wood and stone in their hands, angrily assailed each other.

One was Rupe, the other was Horopapera Matangi.

One advocated the sale of surplus lands, the other vigorously opposed it, and insisted on the principle of “Maori land for Maori men.”

Then there arose a dispute about the ownership of a tangiwai (greenstone pendant).

From the argument, they came to hurling abusive threats at each other.

At last Rupe furiously hurled his weapon, a sharp wooden spear, at Horopapera, who dodged it, and cleverly caught it near the butt end as it whistled past him.

He instantly smartly returned it to its owner, spearing him through the leg.

Next two women went at it.

Women of rank these, who considered themselves entitled to equal debating voice with the men-folk.

Their powers of rhetoric and invective exhausted, they fell on each other very literally “tooth and nail,”
biting, hair- pulling, scratching, screaming.

In their struggle, they tore each other's clothes off, and two nude Amazons raged around the marae.

One of the wild women, a young chieftainess, her long hair streaming behind her, her pendant breasts quivering, her shoulders bleeding, seized a canoe paddle and struck her antagonist a blow across the naked back with it.

The other grabbed a tokotoko, or walking-staff, and, thrusting it between her opponent's legs, neatly up-ended her, in the “altogether,” on the green marae.

By this time the whole tribe were into the battle, with sticks, paddles, spears, and any weapon they could lay their hands on, men and women alike.

It was a real faction fight.

Fortunately, the people had left their guns in their whares, and were too intent upon their hand-to-hand encounter to run for their firearms.

Kimble Bent stood on one side watching the squabble.

He was close to the river-bank, where the canoes were tied up.

Presently, one of the Maoris ran down to the water-side with an axe and began furiously cutting away at his antagonists' canoes.

Others ran to the cooking hangis, and with burning sticks from the ovens set fire to some of the thatched houses in the kainga.

Soon there was a pretty blaze, and half the village was burned down in a few minutes.

In half an hour's time the people had cooled down, and the trouble was over.

Then, a Hibernian people the Maoris, surely, they began to weep over their quarrel, and fell on each other's necks, or, rather, pressed each other's noses, to make up for the hard words and blows they had just exchanged, and set to work to rebuild the dwellings they had destroyed in their hasty anger.
. . . . .

Meanwhile, Titokowaru wearied for the trail again, unable to rest in this secluded wilderness of the Waitara.

His tapu status had been restored by a Waitara priest, with the appropriate karakias [songs/chants] and invocations.

Gathering together a band of his warriors, the remnant of the once ever-victorious Tekau-ma-rua, he paraded them in the marae of the Kawau pa, and farewelling his people, took his old place at the head of the taua and led them off in a grand war-dance.

A truly savage figure, that stern old chief, as he leaped to the van of his war party and danced, his sacred taiaha [club] in the air, his waist girt with a coloured shawl, a rich feather cape of native make fastened over the left shoulder and under the right, his grizzled head decked with white plumes.

And with loud cries of “Haere, ra, Haere ra” the villagers farewelled the great war chief as he marched his armed men out of the pa and struck into the forest of the Taramouku, bound for the open lands of South Taranaki and his ancestral home.

But it was no longer the war-trail, for Titoko and his henchmen fought no more, but betook themselves to the great camp of Te Whiti the Prophet, who preached peace, and prophesied sundry supernatural ways by which the Maori would come into his own again.
. . . . .
The minds of these isolated forest-dwellers were saturated with superstition, with strange beliefs that were a reflex of the vast untrimmed places of nature in which they lived.

The white man, too, almost came to believe in the tales of saurian-like taniwhas and water-demons, in the patupaiarehe and maero, the forest-fairies and forest-giants, in the occult malevolence of the tapu and makutu spells.

Info From

The first of the below posts has a list of the previous posts of Maori Myths and Legends

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/how-war-was-declared-between-tainui-and-arawa

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-1

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-curse-of-manaia-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-hatupatu-and-his-brothers

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/hatupatu-and-his-brothers-part-2

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-the-emigration-of-turi-an-ancestor-of-wanganui

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-continuing-legend-of-turi

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/turi-seeks-patea

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-legend-of-manaia-and-why-he-emigrated-to-new-zealand

https://steemit.com/history/@len.george/the-love-story-of-hine-moa-the-maiden-of-rotorua