“TE KITOHI."

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVII, Issue 8353, 13 February 1913, Page 10

“TE KITOHI."

LAST OF THE OLD MISSIONARIES MR GIXTOS AND HIS LIFE WORK. SOME ADVENTURES IN THE NORTH. (Written for the - New Zealand Times.”) By “ Waikato.” “ Te Kitohi ” is the name by which bo is universally known amongst the Maoris. It is the native way ot • pronouncing Dittos, but to the Maori mind there is also a coincidence ot special appropriateness in the tact that the name us iiaorilied holds reference to the special functions of the missionary,^ tor '• ki ” means to speak, and ‘ toiu to baptise with .sprinklings and incantations. Remaps there is no missionary teacher, with, the possible exception ot the first Selwyn, whose nans* is held in greater honour amongst the Maoris of tno Auckland than that ot the venerable man who has just completed his sixty years of religious work amongst the native people- He is about the last of the okl generation ot missionaries; if there be another it is the aged Bishop VVillianas, late of waiapu. Jtiis memories ot the Maori go back considerably further than his iixty years of service; "they began, in fact with the very foundation ot New Zealand as a - British settlement, for he landed in Auckland as a youth seventy-three years ago. A wonderful record, without a parallel in our missionary chronicles, for most of v the early piotneers of Christian work in this wild now land arrived at a much more advanced age, and non© of them, as far as the writer can call to mind, lasted out sixty years of this hard, dangerous, and self-sacrificing task. H© is a cheerful veteran, the Reverend William Gittos, this Grand Old Man of the Methodist Church. His broad shoulders are stooped, and his beard has been white this many a year w_as far back as i can r§mjember Mr Gittos he was an old man—but his step is still firm and his eye holds a twinkle of pleasant shrewdness. The hard and frugal life he has led, the constant travelling in all kinds of weathers have been, Serhaps, a youth-renewing tonic. But iere cornea a time when all tonics fail, and then the tired frame must be laid on the shelf. At any rate, “To Kitohi” hasn’t wasted his life. He can look hack upon three generations of sound and useful nation-building work, work of far more account than that of the average soldier or the average politician; and now in the honourable decline of his laborious days he could say with one of old Ossian s heroea.: “ The darkness of age comes like the xriist of the desert. My shield • is worn with years I My sword is fixed in its place. X said to my soul, Thy evening shall bo calm, thy departure like a fading light.” ■ PIONEERING UN THE KAIPARA. When the -writer first made, the acquaintance of “Father ” Gittos he was working amongst the Kingite natives of the Waikato, old Tawhiao’s people, coaxing them back from Hauhau-ism, working against strong opposition and much war-made bitterness, but m the end succeeding. But the beginning of his missonary work was well-nigh forty years before that. He was already a .Maori linguist when, in the early til ties, he went up to the Kaipara and commenced work amongst the NgatiU’hatua tribe. In 1856 he established a Wesleyan mission at Oruawharo, opposite the spot where the settlement of Tort Albert was founded six or seven years later. Later he settled on the Waingohi, a branch of the Oruawharo, and there he gathered round him a band of faithful adherents, and made a pleasant garden in the Maori wilder, ness. When the Matilda Wattenbacn settlers-arrived in the Kaipara in 1862 he was the first to welcome them to that new and strange land, and endless were his kindnesses in settling them in their- bush homes and in negotiating between them and the natives. •“ Gittos is the father of Albertland ” is what those Kaipara pioneers used to ■tell everyone in after years. It was indeed a wild place, the Kaipara of the Northern Wairoa, in tho fifties and early sixties; bum everywhere to the margins of the great tidal rivers, with just a tiny Maori or pakeha-Maori clearing here and there. But the Maoris received the early settlers with the greatest kindness. THE OLDEN CHIEFS AND TOHUNGAS. Amongst the JNgati-Whatua were jorne splendid old chiefs, such as Paikea, Tirarau, Parore toiAwha. and Taoho; true rangatiras, dignified old fellows, wonderfully tattooed and full of the ancient loro of their race. From men like these Mr Gittos learned much of ' the history and customs, and poetry and hidden wisdom of the Maoris. Day after day and night after night he used to talk with these cfiiofs and tohungas, teaching them the new faith, and listening to their curious storo of knowledge in return. ■Then, further North, he made the acquaintance of the Ngapuhi, the Rarawa, and other numerous tribes, teaching them, listening to their troubles, advising them in temporal as well as in spiritual matters, often by his counsel and influence averting war and bloodshed. Thus he worked, always ■with the good of his Maori race before him, until from the Waitemata to the waters of Hokianga there was no single man, Maori or white, who could command so much respect and “ aroha ” as himself, “ Te Kitohi.” It meant much hard work and often danger. “ Te Kitohi ” could paddle his own canoe and sail his own boat, and ho developed a tireless capacity for riding and walking all day, and then talking, or being talked to, all night to finish it off. And withal ho couldT live on the foods of the Maori with contentment and thankfulness, for civilisation was often a long way off. 'THE LAND OF FEW WHITESKINS. in the year 1869, says Mr S. Percy >nn th, ex-Surveyor-General, who is ■spending his leisured old ago in his ■ ■ 1 ! Mvmouth home, there were very few white men living on the Kaipara, an 1 of those Mr Gittos was the most influential. He was then in the prime of his young manhood, and was doing Him work amongst his friends of the ,s gati-Wnatua. Air Percy Smith was then engaged fn Government survey work along the shores of the great harbour. Tho only white men besides himself and Mr Gittos were (the late) Air C. E. Nelson, Air George Rix, Captain Stannaway, and Air Alarriner, who was in charge of Brown and Campbell’s establishment at Alangawhare, on the Wairoa, with some few Europeans engaged under him in tho kauri spar trade. “It would be difficult,” Air S. Percy Smith.wrote some years ago in one of his historical works, “to find anywhere a finer people than tho NgatlWhatna were at that time; they retained all the best points of the Alaori cSSracter, whilst .the jrorst had been

eradicated by the efforts of their missionaries, the Revs. Alessrs Buller and Gittos. They were strictly honest and honourable in all their dealings, hospitable to a fault, and appeared to me to follow tho teachings of tho 'missionaries in a true spirit of Christianity.” The Rev. James Bullet, who is mentioned by Air Smith, and who was the father of the late Sir Walter Buller, was the first missionary to settle on the Northern Wairoa; his old station is still to be seen at a beautiful spot in a -bend of the great river, at Tangiteroria. Often had Air Gittos to intervene in inter-tribal disputes, over land and other troubles. In 1863 he was the means of averting serious trouble in the Kaipara district which would have involved the European settlers, for the rebel Waikatos who had been captured at tho battle or Rangiriri and who thereafter escaped from the Kawau, Sir George Grey’s island in the Hauraki |Gulf, passed through the Albertland district, and there was falk of some of the iNgati-Whatua joining them and turning Kingites. However, Ngati-Whatua remained loyal to the Government, and it is believed to be largely owing to Mr Gittos’s appeals that tho doubtful ones remained friendly. HONE TOIA’S “REBELLION.” One exciting affair in which Air Gittos did the State some little service oomos well within the writer’s personal recollection. It was up at Rawene, tho little township on Hokianga harbour, in 1898, at the time of Hone Toia’s short-lived rising against pakeha taxes and pakeha authority. The seat of the trouble was the Waima valley, twelve miles from Hokianga; our Government column in the end marched through the bush to the Waima valley, without meeting with any more serious opposition than a couple of shots fired over our heads by a Alaori fanatic. But Hone Toia had seventy or eighty men armed with rifles and shot-guns, and it very nearly came to a serious ambuscade and fight on the Wanna road. Now, a day or two before the arrival of the troops from Wellington, and when Rawene was practically defenceless, a war-party of Toia’s AXahurehure tribesmen, all armed, made a threatening demonstration close to the township, by way of Scaring tho pakehas, if nothing more. Air Gittos happened to be there; he had hurried up to Hokianga to try and persuade his old flock to abandon their silly little rebellion. The alarm was given “The Alaoris are on usl” and the scared population, or most of it, took refuge on a coastal steamer lying at the little wharf. Mr Gittos decided to go and have a talk with the Waima fire-eaters. As he ascended the hill towards them, together with his Maori coadjutor, the Rev. Pifipi Rakena, he found himself covered by the guns of about a dozen Alaoris, all stripped for the fighting-trail. Piripi, not liking the look of things, suggested, “Had we not better go back ?” “No,” said Air Gittos, “there’s no fear of them shooting us. We’ll go on.” Piripi, somewhat reassured, went on with his “father,” but, as he said afterwards, there was no knowing hut what some of those guns would go off at any time, for the faces behind them looked very determined. However, there was no shooting. The Alaoris received “Te Kitohi” with friendliness; they no longer "drew a bead” on their spiritual adviser, and they listened with respect to his counsel—although they didn’t take it in its entirety. Anyway they retired to the bush, and no powder was burned that day. Their leader, the old chief Romana t© Paehangi, was a picturesquely martial figure, with something of the piratical cut about his costume that hardly accorded with his benevolent face, his flowing grey beard and his portly form. He was attired in a red shirt and red pyjamas; -round his waist was a leather belt to which cartridge pouches were attached, and through which a short-handled tomahawk was thrust; and ho carried a double-barrelled gun. The rest of the war party were in fighting rig, consisting ,of a shawl round the waist, kilt-fashion, -with cartridge-belts and bags across their shoulders. They were out for business, as they afterwards assured this scribe. But the anti-dog-tax and land-tax rising came to an ignominious end—and when Hone Toia came out of gaol the Government, with admirable discretion, made him a dog-tax-collector. There’ll be no more “risings” at Waima. * • • • Such are some of tho memories the fine old missionary can look back upon. He certainly could give us a readable early-days hook if he liked; and if he were to embody in it, as- he could, the folk-talk and 'savage wisdom of the Maori of half a century ago, it would be a quite 'enthralling chronicle of a wild lire that has passed away fonever.