TRAILS ROUND TUTIRA LAKE 71 



that there has been prolonged settlement is proved by the huge 

 deposits of kakahi shell and splintered cooking stone, which are in 

 places feet deep intermixed with soil. Taupunga may have been a 

 pa when the Maori race was at its zenith in numbers. Except during 

 that period it is unlikely that any population resident on Tutira could 

 have manned so large a space. There are, at any rate, no signs of its use 

 except as a kainga between the cessation of intertribal fighting and the 

 beginning of war with the white settler. 



A hundred yards inland, on the margin of the Kahikanui Swamp, 

 and immediately beneath the western spurs of the hill Te Hinu-o-Taorua, 

 flourished in the 'eighties large peach- and cherry-groves. The former 

 fruit had been planted by the Maori in his last decade of occupation, the 

 latter by the white man immediately after arrival on the run. Close to 

 this orchard grew, in '82, three tall white pines, survivors of the 

 kahika grove, from which the flat had probably taken its name. At this 

 date, too, the remains of a reed-thatched whare still stood by the pine- 

 trees. It had been for a considerable time station headquarters, one of 

 the halting-places of the ark ere it finally rested on Otutepiriao, the 

 site of the present homestead. Amid the then densely growing flax 

 there existed also a clearing of several acres, the chance result of fire 

 probably, in the first instance, but later taken advantage of and utilised 

 for cropping, as in the case of the grubbed grounds of the Mangahina- 

 hina, and the fertile slips and washings of the " EacecOurse Flat." 



Proceeding, our track passed over the point of the steep spur Te 

 Pou. A little further along the lake lies the island Tauranga-koau, 

 well known in east coast history on account of the death of Ti Waewae 

 and the vengeance of the Ngai-Tatara, or, as they were later known, the 

 Ngati-kuru-mokihi. Ti Waewae had married Hitau, a sister of Te Whata- 

 nui, a chief of the Ngati-raukawa, a war-party of whose tribe was defeated 

 near Puketapu. The survivors fled for protection to Ti Waewae, who 

 was then living with the Ngati-paru at Te Putere. He entertained, 

 then slew and ate his guests, a procedure by the way which must not 

 shock my readers, which may indeed have been perfectly correct tika, 

 for we cannot apply to tribal custom the standard of Christian ethics. 

 He may have, like Fhairshon l in Bon Gaultier, but avenged an ancestral 

 wrong committed generations back. Be that as it may, awaiting events 

 Ti Waewae established himself on Tauranga-koau, and there prepared 



1 " It is now six hundred coot long years and more since my glen was plundered." 



