1062 AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



horror of the enemy's situation was not known till afterwards. When they thus elected 

 to die rather than surrender, they had been three clays without a drop of water, and 

 had nothing to eat but a scanty supply of dried tawa berries and raw maize ! Imme- 

 diately after the firing was resumed, a soldier of the Eighteenth, throwing his cap over 

 a partial breach, rushed after it, and was followed by Captain Hertford and twenty men 

 of the Colonial Defence Force. The enemy, packed into a corner, received them with 

 a withering volley, before which the officer and ten men fell. Shortly afterwards the 

 Sixty-fifth and the militia made an assault on the opposite side of the works, and were 

 also repulsed. The enemy, having now exhausted their ammunition, left the pah on the 

 side which was invested by a double line of the Fortieth, under Colonel Leslie, and 

 jumping over the trench concealing the first line, were actually through the second line 

 before they were discovered. The column of natives with the women, the children and 

 the leading chiefs in the centre marched as steadily towards their place of refuge as if 

 no danger threatened them ; but, as soon as the yells of the troops proclaimed that 

 the retreat had been discovered, they quickened their pace and made with all speed 

 towards a neighbouring swamp. A body of colonial cavalry and mounted artillery, 

 together with the Colonial Forest Rangers, under Captains Jackson and Von Tempsky, 

 however, headed them as they emerged from the swamp, and under a deadly fire the 

 little band was almost decimated. The Maoris lost about two hundred. Upwards of 

 one hundred bodies were picked up on the field, and twenty were said to have been 

 buried in the entrenchments. Twenty-six wounded and seven unwouncled were taken 

 prisoners, and of the wounded twelve were women and children. Rewi, with a 

 small party of seven or eight, escaped. The British loss amounted to sixteen killed 

 and fifty-two wounded. 



General Cameron returned to Pukerimu to resume operations against Maungatautari, 

 but, on the morning of the 5th of April, he found that it had been evacuated. This 

 practically ended the Waikato War, in which an able general, at the head of twenty 

 thousand men, had been fighting an enemy whose numerical strength did not exceed one 

 thousand men ; a war, too, which involved the colony in a debt of three million pounds, 

 besides Imperial claims incurred on account of military expenditure. To this may also 

 be added the devastation of prosperous settlements, and general hardship consequent upon 

 all the able-bodied men in Auckland being kept under arms and forced to perform 

 military service, to the unavoidable detriment of their customary avocations. To the 

 Ngatihaua tribe the war brought ruin, for almost all their lands were included in the 

 general confiscation scheme, while the Ngatimaniapoto tribe, which had practically 

 provoked hostilities, lost very little territory. The new frontier line was drawn from 

 Raglan, on the west coast, through the rich plains of Upper Waikato to Tauranga, 

 and the lands confiscated by the Government were settled with military and volunteer 

 settlers. Tamihana died of consumption in December, 1866. 



THE EAST COAST CAMPAIGN. 



But though peace once more reigned in the Waikato, the insurrection had not been 

 quelled. Tauranga, in the Bay of Plenty, is only forty miles distant in a straight line 

 from Pukerimu ; it is virtually the port of the \Vaikato ; and large bodies of its natives 



