10 
INTRODUCTION. 
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, showing 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 
1000 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 boast¬ 
ing itself pre-eminently, as the most polite and civilized in the 
world and, in addition too, he might have said, professedly 
Christian, as well. 
After Kororareka fell into Heke’s hands, he allowed the 
inhabitants to re-enter their houses, and carry off their chief 
valuables; he spared the churches and the houses of the 
ministers ; and after 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. 
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 the 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 crops 
on which they had to depend for winter subsistence; the con¬ 
sequence was frequent famines ; to such straits have they been 
reduced that there are traditions of men killing and eating even 
their own wives and children. Can we then wonder that they 
should eat the bodies of those slain in fight. Still there were 
* See Cruise of the Blonde , by Lieut. Dampier. 
