HONGI. 
313 
college, being part of its endowment. Hongi returned to the 
Bay. Each canoe was filled with captives, and had several heads 
of their enemies placed at their stems and sterns by way of 
ornament. Hongi had twenty prisoners on board his canoe, 
whom he intended to retain as slaves ; but his daughter, who 
had lost her husband in the fight, with dishevelled locks, rushed 
down to the water’s edge, as the canoe touched the shore, and 
seizing the sword presented to her father by the King’s own 
hand, jumped on board, and smote off sixteen heads of the 
poor captives, who, without a murmur, placed their necks 
over the side-board of the canoe.* Twenty more were also 
killed and eaten ; and yet the frantic woman, not thinking 
that the shade of her husband was sufficiently appeased with 
this sacrifice, went into the bush with a loaded musket, and 
there shot herself; the ball, however, only passing through 
her arm, instead of her head, she was still alive when found, 
but determined to accompany her husband to the Reinga, she 
afterwards strangled herself. 
Hongi had no sooner finished one expedition than he pre¬ 
pared for another. He quickly assembled a thousand men, and 
proceeded with them to Mercury Bay, to make war upon the 
tribes of that district, ordering another army of two thousand 
more to be raised, and to follow him. Success again attended 
his arms, and, flushed with victory, he next attacked Kaipara, 
where he made a great slaughter. In 1822, he again visited 
the Thames and the Waikato, and ascended the Waipa, where 
he took several large pas, thence he nearly penetrated as far 
as the Wanganui ; in this expedition he slew fifteen hundred 
of his enemies. 
In 1823, he attacked Rotorua, conveying his canoes by 
water, as far as possible, and then dragging them by a road he 
had cut through the forest, to the lake. Here again he was 
victorious, and slew many. He continued every year his 
hostile raids, first to one part and then to another, always with 
success. His name spread terror wherever he went; in fact, 
he became the Napoleon of New Zealand, and declared when 
* An eye witness related this horrid butchery to me,—Mr. Puckey, of 
Kaitara, one of our Catechists. 
