Hēnare Taratoa: A scholar in a garrison world

“Even as he took up arms against British troops at Gate Pā Pukehinahina in 1864, Ngāi Te Rangi scholar Hēnare Taratoa stayed his path as a man of peace and faith,” writes Professor Charlotte Macdonald.

This is an edited excerpt from her new book, Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire.

 

At the top of the social calendar for Auckland in the autumn of 1850 was the wedding which took place at the newly built St John’s College chapel on April 3.

Two couples stood at the altar before Bishop George Selwyn: Hēnare Taratoa and his bride Emily Te Rua, and Lieutenant-Governor Edward Eyre and his bride Fanny Ormond. After the marriage ceremony concluded, the two couples and their guests celebrated in the college dining hall. Around the table were Bishop Selwyn and his wife Sarah, Governor George Grey and his wife Eliza, and a number of leading residents of the town, Māori and Pākehā.

Taratoa and Eyre had spent some time together at St John’s College. They were on trusting terms, sufficient for Eyre to make a daguerrotype (an early form of photograph) of Taratoa. The image speaks powerfully across time.

Fifteen years later, Taratoa was dead, killed in the battle of Te Ranga on June 21, 1864, a tragic episode in the New Zealand Wars. In 1865, Edward Eyre was facing accusations of murder. As Governor of Jamaica, he had ordered a brutal suppression following an incident outside a courthouse. Over 400 people had been killed, hundreds flogged, and property destroyed. Outrage at these events led to Eyre being tagged “the butcher of Jamaica” and to calls for his trial for murder.

The path from festive wedding breakfast to killing fields is stark. Taratoa and Eyre’s lives diverged dramatically. By the mid-1860s, both were caught up in a series of violent crises across the British Empire. Within what had become a garrison world, Taratoa was the honourable fighter, the scholar who took up arms.

At the time of his wedding in 1850, Hēnare Taratoa was a student at St John’s College, one of the young Māori men training to become clergy in what was the burgeoning Te Hāhi Mihinare, the Māori Anglican Church. Taratoa was a gifted scholar. While he was not ultimately ordained into the church, Taratoa spent the late 1850s as a lay reader and teacher at the school in Ōtaki. He wrote the practical textbook He Pukapuka Whiha Tenei Hei Ako Ma Nga Tangata.

Taratoa walked in multiple worlds, Māori and Pākehā, church and beyond, and among iwi and the new world that was rapidly evolving around him. Settler demand for land became increasingly pressing, breaking out into conflict first in Taranaki. Assault on the whenua, on rangatiratanga, led to him taking up arms.

When war broke out in Taranaki in 1860, Taratoa spoke out against Governor Grey’s orders for soldiers to fight against iwi. He moved back to Tauranga and his own iwi, Ngāi Te Rangi, soon afterwards, and was there when General Cameron ordered the mass movement of British troops to Tauranga Moana in January 1864. The loyalties of Taratoa to his iwi had become the priority while his conviction as a devout Christian remained unwavering.

War came to Tauranga abruptly and dramatically in January 1864. General Cameron, in command of the British forces in New Zealand, ordered large numbers of soldiers, including the largest artillery contingent assembled in the campaign, to this part of the country in the hope of cutting off support for the Kīngitanga in the Waikato coming from the east. Naval ships carrying soldiers, field guns, horses, supplies and the Naval Brigade anchored in the waters of Tauranga Moana. They included HMS Esk, Harrier, and Miranda, large, modern warships. Soldiers and marines set up camp in the grounds of what had been the Church Missionary Society base on the Te Papa peninsula for the past 20 years.

Soldiers in the camp included men of the 43rd and 68th regiments who had arrived in New Zealand just a few weeks earlier, adding to the 8,000 or so already amassed to fight a much smaller number of opponents. The 68th sailed to Auckland from Rangoon, one of several regiments that came from the Indian subcontinent to fight in New Zealand in the 1860s.

Hēnare Taratoa joined his people in standing against the British troops at Gate Pā Pukehinahina in April 1864. Taratoa drafted the code of conduct delivered to Colonel Greer, setting out the terms on which fighting would take place. Henry Harpur Greer was in command of the 68th regiment, known for the harsh discipline he imposed on his troops. His readiness to flog his troops led to one of them describing him as “a tyrant”.

Taratoa’s code stated that the fight would be principled, and casualties would be treated with respect. If there was to be war and fighting, it would be conducted on a fair and honourable basis. Taratoa addressed his opponents as fellow Christian believers. The British officers were astonished to receive such a message.

Ngāi Te Rangi and their supporters, including Hēnare Taratoa, prepared to face their British opponents. As is well known, they designed and built the sophisticated Gate Pā Pukehinahina, which remained intact in the face of a full day’s bombardment by a massive battery of British artillery. General Cameron suffered his single largest and most unambiguous defeat in the whole campaign. The British had been repulsed by a much smaller and less equipped opponent. Casualties were treated with compassion, as the code of conduct had set down.

Several weeks later, events were to take a dramatic turn. In late June 1864, an early morning patrol by a group of soldiers, largely from the 68th and 43rd regiments stationed at Tauranga, came across a partly built pā further along the ridge from Gate Pā Pukehinahina at Te Ranga. Taken by surprise, the British attacked, and immediately laid siege to the men building the pā. The one-sided encounter exacted a bloody death toll. Amongst some local iwi, the confrontation at Te Ranga is referred to as “Mate Kōhuru” — treacherous murder. An estimated 106 Māori were killed, including Hēnare Taratoa.

Taratoa was found with a copy of the code of conduct sewn into his jacket with the verse from the New Testament book of Romans 12:20: “If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink.”

Hēnare Taratoa had become drawn into the garrison world. The presence and use of soldiers and force had replaced the talking and treaty-making of 1840. The common Christian faith that Taratoa followed to become a student of theology at St John’s College remained with him to his death. His path as a man of peace and faith to a principled fighter was a tragic result of the resort to force and war.

As to the fate of Edward Eyre, he was replaced as the Governor of Jamaica, pensioned off, and his actions investigated by a Royal Commission. But a number of leading figures in England regarded this as insufficient (including those who had fought for the abolition of slavery). They sought to have him tried for murder in a court of law. Although they ultimately failed, the “Eyre” controversy provoked a prominent and highly divisive debate.

The life of Hēnare Taratoa spans the mid-19th-century world that not only saw a retreat from talking and Te Tiriti in Aotearoa but a hardening of action and rhetoric across the world. The humanitarian legacies of anti-slavery had faded, and were replaced by justifications for violence in which wars in New Zealand and the massacre in Jamaica were both a part. Taratoa shows us a path that could have been taken.

 

Charlotte Macdonald is Professor Emerita of History at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington and one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading historians. This is an edited extract from her new book, Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and across the British Empire (BWB $69.99).