498 ADVENTURE IN NEW ZEALAND. Chap. X^^II. 
the hack of the town, hy the native who was shot by 
another in Wellington some months before. He 
described the whole afifair circumstantially, and stated 
as a proof that the adze with which the deed was done 
remained with the father of the murderer at a settle- 
ment on the main opposite Mana. 
He then spoke about the natives living in the town 
and neighbourhood ; and declared that there was not a 
single one sincerely friendly to us, except E Puni. He 
named E Tako and Mo^wroo, a chief of Pipitea, as at the 
head of an extensive and well-arranged plan, organized 
at the time of E ^aho's trial, for attacking the town, 
should his sentence have seemed to them too severe ; 
and said that messengers from this tribe had been in 
constant communication with him as to their proceed- 
ings. With his usual treachery, he thus betrayed the 
plans of the Ngatiawa tribes, his old enemies ; but only 
after they had been unsuccessful, and too late for them 
to be thwarted had they been carried out, for the trial 
was to have taken place nine days before, and I did not 
even know the result. He ridiculed the idea of the 53 
soldiers resisting such a combined attack as they had 
planned ; and still more -the belief entertained by many 
people that the natives were Christianized and therefore 
averse to such doings. He said that the mihanere 
was only used as a cloak ; and that in private they 
swore at the missionaries as the principal cause of their 
disasters, and were perfectly ready at any time to sing 
the war-song with their old fury. 
He told me that E Mare, the chief of the Chatham 
Islands, and another native whom he named, had ke])t 
the TVaikanae people informed of their plans, and that 
they, in their turn, communicated with him. 
He praised my prudence in carrying arms wherever 
I went; for, he said, the constables and the soldiers 
