INTRODUCTION. 
9 
caves, and were completely at the mercy of their enemies, 
who had only to blockade the entrance to make them 
submit to their terms, the French officer commanded his 
men to stop it up with combustible materials, and then 
set fire to them, and to keep those fires burning the whole 
of the night. We can scarcely imagine anything more 
horrible. The graphic pen of a witness has recorded, “ In 
the morning all was still ; the soldiers entered the caves, and 
found piles of men, women, and children at the breast, with 
convulsed features, shewing the horrid agonies they had 
endured, and in that state no feeling of remorse or pity 
was felt, but the soldiers had nerve enough to plunder the 
corpses of their jewels ! ” At one fell blow from 800 to 
1,000 human beings thus fearfully perished ! ! And this 
too in the nineteenth century, and, as the eye witness of this 
horrid holocaust states, the “perpetrators belonged to a nation 
boasting itself pre-eminently as the most polite and civilized 
in the world and, he might have added, professedly Chris- 
tian. After Kororareka fell into Heke's hands, he allowed 
the inhabitants to re-enter their houses, and carry off their 
chief valuables, spared the churches and the houses of the 
ministers ; and when the battle was terminated, he was not 
guilty of a single act of cruelty, but showed great feeling and 
forbearance ; though from mistaken views he took up arms, 
he did not forget, that he was a responsible being. Nor 
has even the late war been without many noble traits, which 
do honour to our adversaries, but to which it is foreign to 
the present subject further to allude. 
The New Zealanders were cannibals, and great ones too. 
Christian light and knowledge gradually opened their eyes 
to see how horrid and unnatural the custom was, and in 1844 
the last known act of cannibalism took place. If we seek to 
ascertain ttye origin of this custom, we shall doubtless find it 
in want, which has caused even our own countrymen, when 
reduced to starvation, to have recourse to the same dreadful 
expedient for preserving life.* New Zealand had no land 
animals, and their constant wars often destroyed the only 
* See Cruise of the Blonde , by Lieut. Dampier. 
