116 Transactions. 



tribes were successful in expelling Ngatimaru and Ngatipaoa, Ngatihaua 

 would certainly be allowed to return to their ancestral possessions, yet they 

 would under such circumstances do so in a subordinate position. 



Ngatihaua at this time mustered three hundred first-class warriors, ninety 

 per cent, of whom had a firearm of some kind, and they had been disciplined 

 by Te AVaharoa, who for the previous eight years had taught every man 

 of them to look forward to the time when they could burst into the Waikato, 

 and by sheer valour recover their ancestral homes from the numerous enemy 

 in possession. 



News now came that the Waikato tribes had got together eight hundred 

 well-armed men in the Hunua and Manukau Eanges. These now, under 

 several chiefs, proposed to proceed up the Waikato and Waipa Rivers, while 

 other parties were preparing to join them from the Pirongia Range on the 

 west and Mokau on the south. It was time, therefore, for Ngatihaua to 

 act, or leave to others the recovery of the land. 



In this emergency Te Waharoa appealed to his friends (Ngaiterangi, of 

 Tauranga) to lend him a thousand men, not to be exposed to imminent risk, 

 but merely to make a show of force. Ngaiterangi consented. Te Waharoa 

 got the thousand show allies, and the sketch on the preceding page will, I 

 hope, illustrate the great battle that ensued while the Waikato war-parties 

 were stiU several days distant. 



The address of Te Waharoa to his people before leaving the Thames 

 hills was short, and altogether to the point. " Our women* and children,"^ 

 he said, " go with us, for we go to stay. If we cannot conquer, we can die. 

 And our women and children shall be with us in either case. Any of you 

 who have had ' omens ' can remain here and join Ngaiterangi. At dawn 

 of day we march. The women and children will follow. Enough ! You 

 are each as good a man as I, and it is my fixed intention to conquer before 

 the Waikato tribes come up." There were no bad omens, and not a soul 

 of Ngatihaua remained behind. In the afternoon of the follo\\dng day 

 they junctioned with their Ngaiterangi allies, and together they crossed 

 the Waikato River a little above where the Town of Cambridge now 

 stands. 



The Ngatimaru and Ngatipaoa were formed along the brow of the gully 

 and terrace, their left resting on their strong pa, their right on the perpen- 

 dicular cliff of the Waikato River. Their whole line formed nearly a right 

 angle, but they neglected to occupy the mass of loose rocks in the angle 

 formed by the river-cliff and the steep terrace. These rocks, or mass of 

 separate boulders, lay a few yards from the foot of the terrace. Te Waharoa 

 noticed this, and these rocks became a distinct feature in his dispositions. 

 He first of all disposed his thousand Ngaiterangi allies along the gully, with 

 orders merely to keep up as hot a fire as they could across the gully, but he 

 neither asked nor professed to expect from them any actual charge or hand- 

 to-hand conflict. He, however, placed twenty picked men of his own Ngati- 

 haua on the extreme right of his allies, with orders, on a given signal, to 

 charge across the gully regardless of the number opposed to them, and to 

 incite by their example as many as possible of their allies to follow. He then 

 divided the remaining Ngatihaua into two bodies of 140 men each. The 

 left detachment had no leader, as it was extremely uncertain which of them 

 would reach their destined point of attack ; but every man of this 140 

 knew the orders — viz., that they were to creep through the fern to the edge 

 of the chasm, and lower themselves by ropes to the bottom. Five women 

 were detailed to creep after the column and let the ropes go when all the 



