364 Transactions. 
occupation with the actual villages occupied in a district at the present 
ti . . 
time. The fighting Ngati-Tama, who manned and held the many strong- 
holds of that stormy strip of Taranaki coast between the Mokau River 
and the White Cliffs, the “ gateway of the west," have dwindled down to. 
a single scattered village of barely fifty souls ; yet in their day they not 
only withstood the ceaseless onslaughts of the great Maniapoto and Waikato 
tribes, but conducted victorious campaigns to the north and to the south. 
descendants of the old-time military engineers to recite the history of | 
shall never know. 
after the acquisition of guns in the first quarter of the nineteenth centur de 
i i i of Hongi Mika, — 
Te Wherowhero, Te Waharoa, and Te Rauparaha, fully one-half of the 
causes, there was an added infant mortality. To aggravate the introduced 
wastage of Maori life were the unnecessary European wars of the “ forties 
