HISTORICAL REVIEW OF NEW ZEALAND. 



1067 



succeeded by Major-General Trevor Chute. On the 2nd of September, peace was pro- 

 claimed to all west coast rebels, excepting the murderers. While the troops remained at 

 Wanganui there was work of a crucial character on the east coast for the Colonial 

 Forces to undertake. Thither had proceeded the Hauhau fanatics from Taranaki, and 

 on the 2nd of March, 1865, a party of them signalized their arrival at Opotiki by 

 hanging the Rev. C. S. Volkner, a Lutheran missionary, who had joined the Church of 

 England. They then clrank his blood, while their leader, Kereopa, intensified the horror 

 of the atrocity by gouging 

 out and swallowing his 

 v i c t i m's eyes. Four 

 months later, another 

 party of flaukaus at 

 Whakatane, on the same 

 coast, murdered the cap- 

 tain and crew of a small 

 schooner, and a half-caste 

 Government interpreter 

 named Falloon. So 

 shocked were the great 

 body of the Maoris by 

 these excesses that Tami- 

 hana wrote to Colonel 

 Greer, tendering submis- 

 sion on behalf of himself 

 and the King. Two 

 expeditions were sent to 

 the disturbed district 

 one of one hundred 

 Europeans, which arrived 

 at Waiapu in August, to 

 co-operate with the four hundred or five hundred natives who 

 had already begun the campaign under the chiefs Mokena and 

 Ropata Wahawaha, the other of five hundred and eighty men 

 from the Colonial Forces and Native Contingent, which went 

 from Wanganu-i to Opotiki in September. 



This latter expedition, under Majors Brassey and McDonnell, effected a speedy 

 conquest of the Opotiki District, and, in November, was recalled to Wanganui. The 

 Waiapu Expedition, under the joint command of Majors Fraser and Biggs, and power- 

 fully supported by Ropata's strong body of Maoris, achieved still more signal results. 

 Late in September the Haitliau stronghold of Hungahungatoroa surrendered, and two 

 hundred Ngatiporou, with three hundred women and children, were made prisoners. In 

 November, a force of one hundred and ten Europeans, and two hundred and fifty Maoris, 

 besieged the fortified pa/i of Waerenga-a-hika, and, after an engagement in which the 

 enemy lost seventy or eighty men, carried the position, and made three hundred prisoners. 





THE SOLDIERS GRAVES AT TAURANGA. 

 From a Sketch by E. Gouldsmith 



