io4o AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



retired to Pouratawao after the dispersal of his adherents, where he lived quietly until 

 his death in 1855, at the age of seventy years. 



THE OUTBREAK- AT WANGANUI. 



The peace which ensued upon the Horokiwi expedition was short and illusory. 

 Most of the disaffected natives had gone to Wanganui ; and, reasoning from the more 

 lenient treatment of Heke and his followers in the North that desperate and bloody 

 conflicts commanded generous terms of peace, they quietly prepared to resume the field. 

 Towards the end of 1846 some settlers were threatened and plundered, and in December 

 a detachment of soldiers was sent into the district. Nothing of moment, however, 

 occurred till the i6th of April, 1847, when a midshipman of H.M.S. Calliope accidentally 

 shot a native chief through the cheek. The Maoris maintained that the wounded man's 

 life had been deliberately attempted, and the lex talionis was invoked. Two days later, 

 half-a-dozen natives attacked the house of a settler named Gilfillan, six miles from 

 Wanganui, and murdered his wife and four children. Next day, five of the murderers 

 were arrested by friendly natives and handed over to Captain Laye, of the Fifty-eighth. 

 They were tried by court-martial, found guilty, and four of them were executed, the fifth 

 being pardoned on account of his youth. War broke out at once. A soldier of the 

 Fifty-eighth Regiment, wandering too far afield, was murdered, and at noon on the igth 

 of May the hostile natives appeared before the settlement, six hundred strong. The 

 British force consisted of one hundred and seventy men, and was quartered in three 

 wooden stockades, from which, with a gun-boat in the River, a close fire of shot and 

 shell was kept up for five hours. The natives, under the chief Mamaku, replied to 

 the fire from the shelter of the deserted houses in the township, and advancing several 

 times to within pistol-range of the troops, they defiantly challenged them to open combat. 

 But the soldiers had grown wary, and remained within cover. During the night the 

 natives pillaged the town, stole and killed cattle, and then retired with a loss of two 

 chiefs killed and ten wounded. Their opponents sustained no loss. The enemy took up 

 a position three miles off, and for a fee of five pounds a settler was found to take a 

 letter with the news of the rising to Wellington. 



Her Majesty's ships, Calliope and Inflexible, immediately sailed for Wanganui with 

 Governor Grey, Lieutenant-Colonel McCleverty, and detachments of the Fifty-eighth and 

 Sixty-fifth Regiments and of the Royal Artillery, as well as the friendly chiefs Te Whero- 

 whero, Tamati Waka Nene and Te Puni. The available British force now numbered 

 five hundred men. On the 4th of June, the enemy appeared before Wanganui, and 

 made a vain attempt to draw the troops into an ambuscade. A reconnoitring party of 

 the Sixty-fifth was attacked on the roth, and the enemy lost several killed and 

 wounded. They then withdrew higher up the River, but on the 5th, the loth and the i /th 

 of July they returned, and with the utmost daring advanced in small parties close to the 

 stockades. On the igth, a small party of marauding natives attacked the military 

 outside their stockades, and an action was the result, in which the losses on either 

 side were precisely the same: namely, three killed and ten wounded. Next morning the 

 natives sent a challenge to the troops to go out and fight on the open plain with 

 them, and as it was not accepted they proceeded to break up their encampment, and 



