WARLIKE AND PREDATORY EXCURSIONS. 115 
others. These expeditions are, however, gene- 
rally carried on with some show of justice ; they 
have always a reason to assign for executing 
vengeance on their neighbours; — adultery has 
been reported ; an oath has been uttered ; a tapu 
broken ; a theft committed ; a pig has passed over a 
cultivation ; a wife has been taken from another 
tribe ; the people have refused to join in a general 
warfare ; a wife, a child, or a slave punished; — any 
of these, and causes still more frivolous than the 
most frivolous of these, are given as reasons for 
taking all a man or a tribe possesses, and for de- 
stroying what the depredators cannot carry away. 
Some of these expeditions have been attended 
with the most disastrous consequences : a chief 
of note accidentally receives a wound ; a general 
skirmish ensues; lives on both sides are lost; and 
the country becomes involved in a war ; which, 
without the interference of a third party, must 
end in the extermination of one or other of the 
tribes, or of one of the grand populous divisions 
of that part of the island in connexion with either 
side. When once the spear is hurled, or the 
musket fired in earnest, no one knows where, or 
in what, the affair will terminate. The following 
is an instance : — Wareumu, and a party Jfrom 
the Bay of Islands, went over to Hokianga with 
the intention of seizing, or destroying, the cul- 
tivations of one of the tribes on the banks of that 
river, as a payment for some nominal or actual 
crime committed by them. The Hokianga natives 
