Barstow.—Our Earliest Settlers. 431 
house, whilst hundreds of infuriated savages danced a war-dance in front. 
Next he had his cattle killed. The wretched slaves brought from maraud- 
ing expeditions were killed and cooked as near as possible to his house, the 
heads placed upon, and the viscera thrown over, his fence. At one period 
he attempted to rescue these unfortunates by exchanging them for blankets 
or axes, but he found it impossible to provide for them afterwards ; besides 
which the natives imposed upon him by making the necessary fire, shouting 
and yelling over the bound body of a young girl, as if just about to immo- 
late her, and when his feelings of humanity were so wrought upon that he 
could not refrain from redeeming the captive at the cost of nearly his last 
blanket, he found himself jeered at,—the pretended vietim being one of their 
own people. 
The most powerful chief in near proximity to them was Tareha, after 
whom the eastern branch of the Kerikeri estuary, known on the charts as 
Mongonui, was usually termed by old settlers ** Tareha's River." This 
man was a monster both in size and cruelty. I never saw him, but knew 
well his son and successor Wi Kingi Tareha, who, when he first paid me a 
visit, eame erawling on his hands and knees, his legs refusing to bear the 
weight of his body. On a later occasion, when he wished to point out the 
site of a piece of ground near Russell which I had been instructed to have 
purchased, though he had only half a mile of nearly level ground to tra- 
verse, he used two stout young fellows as human crutches, one under each 
arm. In height he stood between 6 feet 1 inch and 6 feet 2 inches, and 
weighed about 86 stone; yet I am told that he was a mere chicken to his 
father, who, having upon one occasion been hoisted on board a whale ship, 
after having devoured a leg of pork and drunk a bucket of the cook's slush, 
consented, for a consideration in tobacco, to allow himself to be weighed. 
A seat was fitted for him, and, the steelyards having been attached to a 
tackle, he was raised up; but, alas! ineffectually, as the steelyards were only 
graduated to 600 lbs., and were inadequate to perform the requisite opera- 
tion. I have heard many wonderful stories of his voracity, but of his 
cruelty I had one from an eye-witness. Tareha was sitting on a large 
stone with a small fire in front of him, when he called for some water ; the 
calabash was empty, and, as he only drank water from a spring a mile 
away, he told a woman near to fetch some. She made the excuse that she 
was nursing a child. “ Give it to me,” said the savage. When the woman 
returned with the water the monster was munching the arms of the child, 
which, after dashing upon the stone, he had frizzled upon the fire before 
him 
To escape some of their miseries the members of the Mission got houses 
built at Tepuna on the land which they had bought, and where Hohaia 
