TAUKE.

Taranaki Daily News, 18 September 1916, Page 7

TAUKE.

THE STORY OF A MYSTIC,' lj [A RAXCATIRA OF THE XCATI- ! , ~ . KL'AX.L'I. - '(By "Orakau," in the Christcliurdi .Star). Taranald papers a few days ago briefly recorded tile death at the age of about S7 years of the native chief Tauke, the oldest rangatira of the Xgati-Ruanni tribe. Tauke's pa-sing deserves a lit'' > more notice, for he was a man of unusual parts, and his sometimes stormy life was closely intertwined with the course of Xew Zealand's Ten Years' War and with tlie troubled political history of the West Coast. Tauke's was a curiously complex character, blending, like 'liis .kinsman, Te Whiti, the ancient'"Maori characteristics with ideas and ideals shaped by his pakeha knowledge and environment. To his last day, however, lie held strongly to his clannish patriotism, never forgetting that he had shed his Mood in defence of the Maori nationality as he and his compatriots conceived it half u century ago. He was lighting man and war-priest, and in his days of peace he revived a kind of lodge of instruction in esoteric Maori matters while singularly at the same time spending liours daily in pouring over the pakeha Scriptures. Some years ago, in the days when old Te Whiti still preached and prop'hesicd in his big native townsaip of ■Parihakc, two of us searched out Tauke, who was reputed by all Taranaki to be the most learned man in local Maori legendry of the people who lived around the foot of the mountain. Tauke's home was the little Maori villago of Hokorima, on the Waimate I'ains. Around were grassy fields and the sociably close-grouped dwellings of the hapu, the clan of the famous fighting chief, Titokowaru. Above on the north, framed like a picture or a theatre drop scone, between two soft green spires of foliage, lifted Taranaki mountain, with its soaring spearhead of silver, ascending in a grand cone-swell, massive but of delicious beauty of curve out of the pur.ple-haze forest that swathed its 'base as in a soft Maori mantle, up and up eight thousand feet . into the glowing sky. So high, so ' serene, so removed from the lower 'world * was this glittering solitary mountain, ' that it seemed the very Tikitiki-o-Rangi ' of_ which the old men tell, the "pinnacle of Heaven," the twelfth or high- ' est heaven of all, the seat and tannic of 10, the Ancient of Days. It was on '' t'ho green turfy marae in front of ' Tauke's house that we found the old man sitting, with a colored blanket girt about his waist, liis white head bare, poring over the ecstatic visions of the , Dreamer in "Whakakitenga," or Revelations, in a fifty-year-old copy of the Scriptures. The old man laid liis book aside and took off his glasses. He look- , ed the mystic that he was; white as Egmont top, calm but deep penetrating . eyes looking out from under white- j bushed buttresses of brows. One of his hands was scarred and mutilated, the thumb and part of a finger missing. | 'That happened at Te Morere," said J Tauke. IN THE TARAXAKI WAR.

Tauke was e type q£ the strongly patriotic men, earnest, to -the .point of fanaticism and savagery, who presented a stubborn frunt to pakeha .progress and civilisation on_the West Coast from 1860 onwards. He was steeped' in the wild warriors' ways from his earliest youth. He was horn in captivity; his parents were taken away from the Waimate Plains in one of the. raids of the Waikato cannibal tribes of more than eighty years ago. When peace returned he and many .if his people were liberated and returned to Taranaki. As a young man he was one of the Taranaki chiefs who went to the Waikato to share in tho "uplifting" of Te Wherowhero, or Fotatau—his old hereditary enemy—as the first King of, the Maoris, -and he was at Ngaruawahia, at the royal camp, where the Waikato and Waipa rivers meet under the shadow of lofty forested Hakavimata, when the Taranaki war began in 1860. Hurrying back to his tribe, Tauke fought against the Imperial and colonial trorps at the battle o£ Waireka, on the seaward side of the mountain, where the Taranaki settlers for the first time met their Maori neighbors in light, lie was. too, a kind of"lay reader—''missionary," he called it—to liis tribe at Waireka; for the Maori was devout in war as well as in peace, like the Crusaders and Cromwell's Roundheads and the Moslem warriors. Then in ISO 4be became a Hanliau, and he was one of the erazy band ot heroes and fanatics who charged upon the British redoubt at Sentry Hill, or Te Morere. The railway from Ilawera to Xew Plvmoulh now passes within a few yards "of the spot where, upon a little' femv hill, now demolished, the Imperial soldiers who manned the redoubt poured a storm oE death upon the maddened Taranaki braves from their rifles and cohorn mortars.

THE FATAL GLACIS OF SEXTRY HILL. It was a mad affair; Tauke admitted as much himself with a grin, when 'no told the storv or his wounded 'hand. Hopanaia, the Prophet, led the attack; he was more valiant than prudent. There were fifty men of the 57-th Regiment in tiie redoubf under Major Shortt; the steep hillside was scarped to the foot of the parapet, and there was a sleep face of more than twenty feet high all round the little fort, making it practically impregnable to any Maori war party! However, llapanaia, Kingi, Titokowliru and Tauke led on their men, hapu bv hapu, and after a furious war dance, charged up the hill upon tiie redoubt, in close order. Tauke used his '•tupnra." 'his double-barrelled gun; lus tomahawk was in 'his belt for closequarters work; he was stripped except for a loin• mat; his cheeks and brow were painted red for battle. As the Hauhaus, veiling their Pai-Marire cries, breasted the hill, shoulder to shoulder, gripping gun and long-handled tomahawk, the (op of the parapets 'blazed lire and down the head of the column was swep* B ipeateil rifle volleys and shells from the cohorn mortars spread death and mu'Ration among the deluded warriors. More than fifty were killed; some of tie defeated Hauhaus were dragged off the field, and thirtythree were buried there by the British after the fight. A bullet struck , Tauke's hand, and he was a disabled man for some months thereEight of his Xgati-Ruanui relatives fell in that desperate assault upon a parapeted redoubt in open day. There was one satisfaction: llepanaia, the false prophet, who had foretold, an easy victory—for the pakeha bullets would 'be sure to fly wide of the uplifted hands of the faithful—found 11 pmvg nu the field

. Xgati-Ruamii never forgot the lesson they learnt at To Morere. Henceforth they fought ill tin l bush, where tJit'v had nil the advantage. And the tribcspcople all round tlie imi;.,-t:iiii still sing the old Siid lament wliidi Tauke's kinsman Taliiati Hone ehantei' after (lie foiit for liis two .-oils shot del, on the fatal glacis of Sentry Jlill; th< dirge that ends: My tnll red-painted warrior sons, How grand ye e'harged upon Hie foe!' 'And I —l saw ye go; I too ru.ilied naked to tlie fight, Oli sous—(i Morere! •

How vain your valor, rain your charge I Against Morere's walls! AVrecked on that rock-coast of Death Are all my crews— Taimii, Tokomaru, Kurahaupo, Aotcn, Ah me! My brave canoes Lie broken on the shore! THE WAR IX THE BUSH Later, Tauke fought all through the Hauhau wars up to 18(1!!, whefi Whitmore finally defeated Titokowaru and his man-eating warriors—the Hauhaus revived cannibalism in ISoS—and he was one of the bush-lighters who indicted the disastrous defeat'upon Colonel McDonnell's column in the forest at Te Xgr.lu-o-te-Mann, where von Tempsky was killed But Tauke always fought fairly; indeed, Colonel McDonnell gave him just praise for his efforts to avert attacks upon small forces in the period immediately proceeding the affair at Te Ngutu-o-te-Manu.

The old battlefields were all about us at Hokorima; Te Xgutu, where Tauke and ill is comrades watched the bodies ot von Tem sky and liis score of .slain companions onsuined on a great funeral pyre in the bush clearing is but a little way from the old man's" kaiaiiga. Xow the ancient fanatic fire also had long burned itself to ashes, and Tauke could calmly contemplate the changes which the white man's hand had wrought on the plains; and he turned again to the Prophets- and Revelations, which lie knew by heart so thoroughly, indeed, that he scarcely required his old Book now.

A BOOK FOR GOVERNOR GREY. Tauke told me that he once wrote a hook for ''Governor Grey." This was in the years before the war. It was a big note-book, which, at Sir ,'ieorgc Grey's request, he filled with Taranaki history and folk-stories, and poetry, dictated by his older relatives, the tommgas of Ngati-Ruamii. Sir George Grey, he believed, took it away with him to South Africa; no doubt it is one of tho MS.S. now in the library at Capetown, among the New Zealand books and documents which rightly we should have in this Dominion, and which should be secured by exchange for South African material at present in the Grey collection at Auckland. THE SACRED MOUNTAIN. The old man was a wonderful repository of Taranaki legcndry and poetry, and, above all, was his still active mind rich in poetic memories of Taranaki mountain. Pukc-lraupapa—"Snow Mountain"—he .said was the most ancient name of Egmont's peak. There were fairy people far up on the ranges, in the higher forests; tho strange wood folk called the Tahimingi, whose camp-fire smokes could still be seen in the early summer mornings in tho form of the thinwispy mists that rise from the mountain gullies Tauke, like all the dwellers about the mountain foot, loved and levered Taranaki peak. To him and 'his people it was their "Mahia," their parent; it symbolised their mana and their national existence. The lone and soaring height excited their adoration. "What.

is you mountain standing there above us':'' chanted the captain of the war parties in Tauke's fighting days of more than fifty years ago as he lined his men up for the haka on this very spot before leading them off on the forest trail against the white soldiers. In thundering voice came the response in chorus, with thig'h-smack and foot-stamp: " "lis Taranaki— yes, 'tis Taranaki! O draw near to us, Taranaki, that we may embrace thee, embrace thee!" And again they yelled: "Taranaki—Oh, Taranaki! Thou slialt not be cast away,' cast away to the pakeha!" All through the war, in the days of blood and fire, the Taranaki men invoked Taranaki mountain, the emblem of their tribehood, their silent guardian and their refuge place.

THE TOHUXGA. Taulto was tlie last of the tolnmga? of Xgaruahinc. He was the instructor of the local ''wliave-itmire," the school of legend nnd traditions, genealogical recitals and ancient religion, for the Taranakr Maoris are conservative, and si ill at heart, many of them, inimical to the faith and ways of the w'hite man. His own religion was a -mixture of ancient and modern. Xot many years ago lie married young Maori couples with singular ceremony, the like of which has not ibecn known in other parts of Xew Zealand since the coming of the white missionaries; for his ritual lie went to the very primitive ways of his Polynesian forefathers; a priest of nature. The scene was the tribal meeting-house; all the relatives of the young man and woman were gathered there, and the low door and window closed, and in (he halfdarkness, with a wizardly little lire dickering at the. foot of the central house piilar, Tauke. in the rhythmic measure of the "Karakia Maori," recited the old, old prayers that invoked iiangi and papa, the Sky-Father and Earth-Mother, and besought fruitfillness for the married pair. The old man was explaining some of the folk-talk about Egmont, the Pukehauipapa of the ancients, when liis tattooed and grey-haired wife came out of the wliare, ami spoke to him. Her words were few, but incisive There he was talking to pakehas, and a man of his principles, too! Kaati! That was enough; what had he to do with the pakeha tribe? Pakehas! Then, swinging her short skirt like a Highland piper in his parade swagger, she retired. Tauke turned to us, raised his eyebrows Jlaori fashion, much as a, Frenchman would s'lirug his shoulders, and •smiled as if to -say, "Well, well, she's a woman, and there's no more to be said about it." But the lady with a disdain for the pa'k'eha tribe was the controlling force in the Tauke establishment, for without another word the old man held lout his hand in farewell.

It was perhaps in keeping with the medley of ancient and modern in Tauke that the burial ceremony in the shadow of Taranivki mountain should have been preceded by a poi dance l>y the women of Parihaka, and that the old man of Xgaruahine should have been laid to rest with the not unpoetie conjunction of pakc'ha rites and the paganlike chants of the old religion of his race.